[LAU] Google Magenta project's first composition

[jonetsu at teksavvy.com]

On Sat, 4 Jun 2016 21:28:17 -1000
david <gnome at hawaii.rr.com> wrote:

> Dr Levitin also points out that most people's emotional preference in 
> music is determined during adolescence, when the sex hormones start 
> firing madly and the body is screaming to its surroundings,
> "Reproduce with me!" People fix on the music they think will get them
> laid.

There is a connection between sexuality and music, even with the much
reserved classical music.  Eg. no need to bang drums to be sexual.  But
is there also a more spiritual approach ?  After all, when it comes
down to it, everything vibrates, every single piece of atom does.  We
do not necessarily feel that, although isn't some music trying to make
a connection, a bridge, an experience, with "the universe" base don
frequencies ? For instance some Indian "om" mantras, buddhist gongs,
etc. This aspect, deep into the most superficial human, would evade
totally a machine.
 
> Perhaps another need: The need of people to expand existing knowledge
> in new ways. In Christian music, some have the concept of being
> "priests of creation": People who enable nature to praise God in ways
> nature would be otherwise unable to do on its own. 

It's interesting that the augmented 4th was termed the chord of evil
during the Renaissance and banned from church music.  Today it is used
in emergency sirens.  Some combinations of sounds do interact
"mechanically" (eg. without our conscious will) with our bodies.  This,
though, could be put into the knowledge of a machine.

What makes humans tick can be programmed.  Life itself cannot be known
by a machine.  As some SF authors have written about (notably Frank
Herbert's "Destination: Void" original title "Do I wake or dream?" in
1965) is the goal to make a machine that first, can learn by itself and
then, can eventually grasp the "meaning" of the universe ?  Is the
Google Magenta a tiny step in that direction ?