David Cope

David Howell Cope (May 17, 1941 – May 4, 2025) was an American author, composer, scientist and Dickerson Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. His primary area of research involved artificial intelligence and music; he wrote 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 was also co-founder and CTO Emeritus of Recombinant Inc., a music technology company. He died of congestive heart failure on May 4, 2025, at the age of 83.

Composition

EMI

His EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence, pronounced "Emmy" ) software has produced works in the style of various composers, some of which have been commercially recorded—ranging from short pieces to full-length operas.

In 1981, he received a commission to compose an opera, but had a "composer's block", so he began writing EMI (on an Apple desktop computer) to understand and modify his own style, and 8 years after receiving the commission, managed to write the opera in 2 days with the help of EMI. Once it was done, he applied the same method to other composers like Bartok, Brahms, Chopin, Gershwin, Joplin, Mozart, and Prokoviev, resulting in a program that could compose in their styles as well. He then got an album published Bach By Design which was played by a Disklavier. The next album, Classical Music Composed by Computer, was played by humans.

Douglas Hofstadter developed a touring lecture about EMI, during the middle of which he would play two pieces, one a genuine Chopin piece, and one Chopin-style piece by EMI. The audience would then guess which is which, like in a Turing test. The audience could guess not better than random chance. In 2001, EMI consisted of 20,000 lines of Lisp code. In 2005, Cope deleted EMI’s music database, arguing that because EMI's compositions were "infinitely reproducible", they were devalued by critics.

Emily Howell is a computer program featuring an interactive interface that "hears" feedback from listeners, and builds its own musical compositions from a source database, derived from Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). Cope attempts to “teach” the program by providing feedback so that it can cultivate its own "personal" style. The software appears to be based on latent semantic analysis.

Emily Howell's first album was released in February 2009 by Centaur Records (CRC 3023). Titled From Darkness, Light, this album contains its Opus 1, Opus 2, and Opus 3 compositions for chamber orchestra and multiple pianos. Its second album Breathless was released in December 2012, also by Centaur Records (CRC 3255).

Personal compositions

In 1975, Cope composed a short piece on an IBM machine, using punched cards.

As a composer, Cope's own work 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. 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.