sounds like bach - douglas hofstadter and formalism in classical music

Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in an article titled "Sounds Like Bach" on computer programed classical music:

In my lectures, I usually have a second musical interlude, this time involving mazurkas -- one by Chopin and one by EMI [Experiments in Musical Intelligence]. One time, when I gave this lecture at the world-famous Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, nearly all the composition and music-theory faculty was fooled by the EMI mazurka, taking it for genuine Chopin (and the genuine Chopin piece, by contrast, for a computer-manufactured ditty). An Eastman music student, Kala Pierson, wrote me an email about this event in which she said, 'I voted real-Chopin for the second piece, as did most of my friends. When you announced that the first was Chopin and the second was EMI, there was a collective gasp and an aftermath of what I can only describe as delighted horror. I've never seen so many theorists and their composers shocked out of their smug complacency in one fell swoop (myself included)! It was truly a thing of beauty.'

Much, much more here

Marvin Minsky, called the "father of AI", takes up the same topic but a little earlier than Hofstadter. His argument is more theoretical so he's making a slightly different point from Hofstadter: basically, that the formalistic models of classical music are incomplete but that does not mean we have to give up on the project:

Minsky: In a computation-based treatment of musical expression you

would expect to see attempts to describe and explain such sorts of

structure. Yet the most "respectable" present-day analyses -- e.g., the

well-known Lerdahl & Jackendoff work on generative grammars for

tonal music -- seem to me insufficiently concerned with such

relationships. The so-called "generative" approach purports to describe

all choices open to a speaker or composer -- but it also tries to abstract

away the actual procedure, the temporal evolution of the compositional

process. Consequently, it cannot even begin to describe the choices

composers must actually face -- and we can understand that only by

making models of the cognitive constraints that motivate an author or

composer. I suspect that when we learn how to do that, many

regularities that today are regarded as grammatical will be seen as

results of how the composer's motivations interact with the

knowledge-representation mechanisms shared by the composer and the

listener. In any case it seems to me that, both in music and language,

one must understand the semantics of tension-producing elements -- at

least in the forms that resemble narrative. Each initial discord, be it

melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or whatever, can be seen as a problem to

be later resolved. A lot of what a composer does is setting up

expectations, and then figuring out how to frustrate them. That gives

the composer some problems to solve. The problems and their

solutions are then like elements of a plot, and composition becomes a

kind of story telling.

Otto Laske: To look at composing as a variety of story-telling, and at music as

a pseudo-story, wouldn't that help us to arrive at a theory of musical

discourse?

Just a few paragraphs down we come to what I find to be the most interesting aspect, the (partial) answer to the above:

OL: So, then, for you to apply AI to music, if one can say apply...

MM: ... would be making composers, or at least listeners...

OL: By "making," do you mean to produce a robot-like creature that

does certain things like, observably composing?

MM: Yes, indeed. And in the case of listening it would have to know

when to say "oh, this is exciting," or "how very tender," and the like. I

haven't seen much of that.

OL: In Japan, one has built a robot that is capable of reading music,

and play it on the piano.

MM: Yes, that fellow at Mazda.

OL: Is that something you have in mind here?

MM: Not at all. Because I'm more concerned about what happens at

larger scales of phrase and plot. Our listening machine would have to

understand the music well enough to recognize from each moment to

the next which problems have been solved, and which remain open.

OL: How would that understanding have to become manifest?

MM: Well, for example, an understanding listener can hear a piano

concerto and appropriately say things like "that was a good idea here in

the cadenza, but he didn't carry it through." I'd want the robot to make

similar analyses.

OL: To do that, the robot must be able to recognize solutions, good or

bad. But then how would it communicate this to others?

MM: One way might be to have it write the sorts of sentences that

critics write. Or to have work more in the musical realm by performing

as a teacher does, explaining differences by demonstration -- "Look how

much better it would be to delay a little these notes here, and make

those near the end more staccato, like this, and this." And of course if

our machine turned out to able to produce interesting enough

interpretations, then we might be satisfied by that alone -- if many

listeners were to agree that "really, that performer has a lot of good ideas

about this music, and brings out stuff that I didn't realize was there."

Here is the lengthy conversation. All emphases my own. See about halfway down for the quoted passages. To defend him, he does consider the possibility of alternative logics (even mentioning Hegel), but "the idea is not carried through." :)

See this comment thread which took place on Joe Rebello's blog back in August where we have a spirited discussion of formalism(s) in economics which directly relates to Minsky's discussion of alternative formalisms in the article.