David Cope (born May 17, 1941, in San Francisco, California) is an American author, composer, scientist, and Dickerson Emeriti Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. His primary area of research involves artificial intelligence and music; he writes programs and algorithms that can analyze existing music and create new compositions in the style of the original input music. He taught the groundbreaking summer workshop in Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music (WACM) that was open to the public as well as a general education course entitled Artificial Intelligence and Music for enrolled UCSC students. Cope is also co-founder and CTO Emeritus of Recombinant Inc., a music technology company.[1]
His EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) software has produced works in the style of various composers,[3][4] some of which have been commercially recorded[5]—ranging from short pieces to full-length operas.[6]
His subsequent Emily Howell program models musical creativity based on the types of creativity outlined by Margaret Boden in her book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms.[7]
As a composer, Cope's own work has encompassed a variety of styles—from the traditional to the avant-garde—and techniques, such as unconventional manners of playing, experimental musical instrument, and microtonal scales, including a 33-note system of just intonation he developed himself.[5] Most recently, all of his original compositions have been written in collaboration with the computer—based on the input of his earlier works. He seeks synergy between composer creativity and computer algorithm as his principal creative direction.
Cope has published a wide range of books, which are often used as textbooks. New Directions in Music, first published in 1971, is currently in its 7th edition and is the standard text for contemporary music.[8] In 2009, Cope was interviewed by the media in anticipation of the release of a CD containing music composed collaboratively by Cope and Emily Howell, a computer program.[3]
Cope has also published a series of detective novels under a pseudonym.[9]
In 2022, Cope published the book Ethics of Computer-Assisted Music. Cope argues that just as there are differences in the application of ethics and morals among diverse cultures across society, there are similar ethical complexities that exist within the field of computer music.[10]
1992. "A Computer Model of Music Composition." In Machine Models of Music, Stephan Schwanauer and David Levitt, eds.: MIT Press.
1992. "On the Algorithmic Representation of Musical Style." In Musical Intelligence, M. Balaban, K. Ebcioglu, and O. Laske, eds. : AAAI Press.
1998. "Signatures and Earmarks: Computer Recognition of Patterns in Music." In Melodic Similarity, Concepts, Procedures, and Applications. Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field (eds.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
1990. "Pattern Matching as an Engine for the Computer Simulation of Musical Style." In Proceedings of the 1990 ICMC. San Fran Computer Music Association
1991. "Recombinant Music." COMPUTER. (July).
1991. "Computer Simulations of Musical Style." Computers in Music Research, The Queens University of Belfast, 7–10 (April): 15–17.
1992. "Computer Modeling of Musical Intelligence in Experiments in Musical Intelligence." Computer Music Journal 16,2 (Summer): 69–83.
Classical music
