Eleanor Selfridge-Field: Symposia, Conference Sessions
Human vs Computer Creativity: Music
The seven videos linked here come from the multipart symposium on Human vs Computer Creativity, moderated by Douglas R. Hofstadter in the autumn of 1997. The series was sponsored by the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, primarily under the guidance of Eleanor Selfridge-Field. Video-taping was provided by Stanford Television for closed-circuit transmission. Links given here are made available by ScholarWorks at Indiana University. Each segment is roughly 90 minutes long.
Musical creativity
The musical segment of the series consisted of two days of lectures and other events, culminating in a concert for piano and violin featuring ten works chosen from both analog and virtual realms. They were performed live by Mary Jane Cope, piano, and Karen Bentley, violin. Audience members were provided with a sheet on which to record their judgments as to whether each individual work was composed by a human composer or constructued algorithmicly by David Cope's Emmy (Experiment in Musical Intelligence) software. This musical program is here. The authorship of each piece was revealed at the conclusion of the performance.
Musical Composition Part One
Musical Composition Part Two
Musical Composition Part Three
Musical Composition Part Four
Musical Composition Part Five
Musical Composition Part Six
Musical Composition Part Seven
Other segments of this series include:
* Chess and Go (two segments)
* Language and Literature (two segments)
* Jokes and Humor (one segment)
* The Big Picture (comprehensive wrap-up, three segments)
A detailed list of individual items is here.
International Musicological Society: Computational Musicology
In 1987 the president of the International Musicological Society asked Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, who had offered a session on emerging computer tools for musical study at their five-year congress in Bologna, to form a study group to explore broader use and international cooperation. This was no small order, because these were the early years of personal computer use and most projects reporting at the time were running on mainframe computers.
Among the challenges were mechanisms for interacting cross continents, each of which had its own pattern of seasons, holidays, and academic sessions. Although the challenges were never fully met, we did succeed in forming a loosely knit group with participants from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and Australia. A high priority was the collection of documentation on existing systems of music representation. This led in time to the publication (1997) of Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes was published by The MIT Press.
Selfridge-Field, with various collaborators, organized substantial sessions for the IMS congresses of 1992 (Barcelona), 1997 (London), 2002 (Leuven), 2007 (Zurich), and 2012 (Rome). Although the name of the study group changed from time to time, the core participants flowly easily from one venue and year to another. These gatherings are itemized separately below. At the end of the Rome congress, Frans Wiering took over the coordination of the group. For current information see this link.