Bulletin No. 1, 2021

16 CHINESE UNIVERSITY BULLETIN NO.1, 2021 Dr. Szeto Wai-man General Education Foundation Programme AI: ART from the norms of music and Bach’s style, and experts can easily differentiate one of its works from an actual Bach. For casual listeners, though, it does the trick. ‘They’re like the student who usually follows the rules and gets the answers right,’ said Dr. Chau of the plethora of AI composers debuting recently. ‘But is that good music?’ ON THE MOST BASIC LEVEL, ART CAN BE QUITE SIMPLE. It is the right colour in the right place, the right note at the right time, and these are things that machines have done reasonably well, being now somewhat able to figure out for themselves what the norm says about being right. But art is also about breaking the norm, and that breakaway must be for a good reason. This transformative aspect of art has been achievable only by living creatures, chiefly humans. With AI, can machines catch up with us in this respect? ‘I won’t rule out that possibility, but it’s not going to be easy,’ said Dr. Szeto. Making it new, to borrow a phrase from the avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound, is not in itself difficult. Back in the 18 th century, composers would mix and match pieces of music in sequences determined by a die in a game called the Musikalisches Würfelspiel —and thus was born a new composition. In theory, computers can do the same with randomness added into their otherwise norm-conforming models. But while innovations are made this way, they are all driven by chance, not by some aesthetic motivation. This is where AI comes to a dead end. ‘Computers do not have motivations. That’s the current state of things,’ said Dr. Chau. For them to get closer to being able to make aesthetic decisions, as Professor Wong noted, we might conduct surveys where humans would rate their works and let them learn what it is that appeals to us. But then of course, it will not be the computer’s own judgment but ours, and what one portion of humanity enjoys is not necessarily enjoyable to another. Furthermore, we will remember that beauty often transcends its time. ‘Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was so poorly received at its premiere that there was literally a riot. Now it’s a classic,’ said Dr. Szeto. ‘It’s unimaginable for a computer to have the same insight as Stravinsky, to know a work is valuable despite how unpalatable it is to the current taste.’ AUTOMATING MUSIC Various attempts have beenmade since themid- 20 th century to get computers to write music as George Papadopoulos and Geriant Wiggins reported. The explorations of the use of AI in composition slowed down during the AI winter of the 1970s and 80s, when the hardware was not powerful enough to implement many of the proposed solutions. At the turn of the century, the dream of automating music production was rekindled with the advent of modern GPUs, which are not limited to processing visual data. AI composers are like the student who usually follows the rules and gets the answers right. But is that good music?