From Markov Chains to Suno

In the nineties the University of Oregon staged a concert with a catch. A pianist played three pieces in the style of Bach. One was written by Bach himself, another by the music theorist Steve Larson, and the third by David Cope’s computer program. The audience was asked to guess which was which. Most decided that the Bach was the program, and that the piece by Larson, a living professor, had been written by the computer.

The American composer David Cope started his project Experiments in Musical Intelligence in 1981, out of a creative block, and jokingly called the program Emmy. Emmy didn’t know the rules of counterpoint that Hiller and Isaacson had written into their program in 1957. Cope fed it Bach’s scores, the program cut them into pieces, found which turns of phrase occurred next to each other in the composer’s music and how he usually moved from one to the next, and assembled new pieces out of those fragments. It pulled the rules out of the music itself. That way Cope accumulated thousands of compositions, including five thousand chorales in the style of Bach.