Like many composers, Emily Howell has her own unique style that she refines constantly. She’ll listen to what critics have to say about her work and then try to write music that is good enough to silence those critiques. Aiming for musical perfection is a very human endeavor, but Emily Howell isn’t a human composer at all. She is a computer program designed by composer, programmer, and author David Cope. A retired professor of music at the University of California Santa Cruz, Cope has spent almost 30 years at the forefront of synthetically composed music. With Emily Howell, he hopes to prove that great musical composition is no longer limited to mankind. Her CD from Centaur Records is set to drop soon.

Cope’s original effort to get a computer to generate new music was called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI (pronounced ‘emmy’). That program was able to analyze the work of other composers and produce a completely new piece in their style. You can download MP3s of the EMI work here, there are compositions in the style of Beethoven, Joplin, Cope himself, and many others. Emily Howell, in some ways the offspring of EMI, analyzes her own work just like EMI would analyze famous composers. The result is a feedback loop that, when coupled with critiques from Cope, has created a musical learning machine. Self-analysis is a key ingredient in artificial intelligence, and Emily Howell may be one of the precursors to self-aware computer programs.
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