Can Computers Make Better Music Than Humans?

Modern technology has made it possible for anyone to be a composer or an artist, so it seems. With software like the MTV Music Generator for PlayStation, even the most tone deaf among us can copy-and-paste rhythms and samples of instruments to successfully create truly good songs. Yes, thanks to the digital age, it is very easy and convenient for anyone to make music.

When the first programmable drum machines hit the scene almost 30 years ago, many were concerned that they might make human drummers obsolete. After all, they never suffer fatigue, miss a beat, and keep impeccable time in every tempo. Even someone with no understanding of rhythm whatsoever can easily program one of these machines to play complicated patterns and polyrhythms, complete with fills and accents.

The secret is the pre-measured loops of rhythmic patterns and fills stored in the machine; all the programmer has to do is copy-and-paste the loops and repeat them as many times as he desires, then paste in fills, punches, and other rhythmic variations as needed. Other more advanced programs allow those with real rhythm building skills to program their own rhythms, note for note, instead of pasting together pre-recorded snippets of rhythms.

While computers can easily achieve technical perfection that most of us mere mortals cannot, the music they generate is rather jejune; devoid of any soul or emotion. It is evident that computer generated songs will always have a huge hole in them where the heart is supposed to be. A computer is incapable of feeling love, hate, anger, or sadness. It cannot reason, ponder questions, or search for the meaning of, or even be aware of its own existence. It can never know the sting of battle, the pain of heartbreak, the joy of hope, the thrill of victory, or any other human experience.

This presents a problem for the music industry, as they seem to be relying ever more heavily on machinery to create music; that way, you can mass-produce it, and virtual musicians work longer and cheaper than actual ones. As long as there are thinking, feeling people still left on Earth, they can never hope to sell music that is little more than extended commercial jingles for FM radio.

The sad irony to this trend is that most human beings are no longer human. They are becoming more and more unfeeling as the years slog on by. The baser, animalistic qualities in people, such as lust, greed, and hedonism, are prevailing. The human race is being guided more by instinct nowadays than by reason or intellect, as each generation becomes more and more like the computers upon which they rely. This may well spell the end of real music by the end of the century; maybe there won't even be any such thing, as all art becomes marginalized as irrelevant, archaic relics of the distant past.