David Cope

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.

• Name — David Cope • Born — 17 May 1941 • Birthplace — San Francisco, California, U.S. • Died — 4 May 2025 • Place of death — Santa Cruz, California, U.S. • Occupation — Author, composer, scientist, professor • Employer — University of California, Santa Cruz • Known for — Research in artificial intelligence and music • Notable Works — EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), Emily Howell • Title — Dickerson Emeriti Professor of Music

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.

His subsequent "Emily Howell" program models musical creativity based on the types of creativity outlined by Margaret Boden in her book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. 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).

• 1992. "A Computer Model of Music Composition." In Machine Models of Music, Stephan Schwanauer and David Levitt, eds.: MIT Press. • 1992. "On the Algorithmic Representation of Musical Style." In Musical Intelligence, M. Balaban, K. Ebcioglu, and O. Laske, eds.: AAAI Press. • 1998. "Signatures and Earmarks: Computer Recognition of Patterns in Music." In Melodic Similarity, Concepts, Procedures, and Applications. Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field (eds.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

• 1987. "Experiments in Music Intelligence." In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, San Francisco: Computer Music Association. • 1987. "An Expert System for Computer-Assisted Music Composition." Computer Music Journal 11,4 (Winter): 30–46. • 1988. "Music and LISP." AI Expert 3,3 (March): 26–34. • 1988. "Music: The Universal Language." In Proceedings of the First Workshop on AI and Music. Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota: AAAI: 87–98. • 1989. "Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI): Non-Linear Linguistic-based Composition." Interface, vol. 18: 117–139. • 1990. "Pattern Matching as an Engine for the Computer Simulation of Musical Style." In Proceedings of the 1990 ICMC. San Fran Computer Music Association • 1991. "Recombinant Music." COMPUTER. (July). • 1991. "Computer Simulations of Musical Style." Computers in Music Research, The Queens University of Belfast, 7–10 (April): 15–17. • 1992. "Computer Modeling of Musical Intelligence in Experiments in Musical Intelligence." Computer Music Journal 16,2 (Summer): 69–83. • 1993. "Virtual Music." Electronic Musician, 9:5 (May): 80–85. • 1996. "Mimesis du style et de la structure musicale." Symposium on Composition, Modelisation et Ordinateur. IRCAM, Paris: 21–23. • 1997. "Composer's Underscoring Environment." In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. San Fran: Computer Music Association. • 1997. "The Composer's Underscoring Environment: CUE." Computer Music Journal 21/3 (Fall). • 1999. "One Approach to Musical Intelligence." IEEE Intelligent Systems. Los Alamitos, California: IEEE Computer Society (14/3, May/June). • 2000. "Facing the Music: Perspectives on Machine Composed Music." Leonardo Music Journal 9: 79–87. • 2002. "Computer Analysis and Composition Using Atonal Voice-Leading Techniques." Perspectives of New Music 40/1 (Winter): 121–146. • 2003. "Computer Analysis of Musical Allusions." Computer Music Journal 27/1: 11–28. • 2004. "A Musical Learning Algorithm." Computer Music Journal 28/3: 12–27. • 2006. "The Vivaldi Code" Wired, issue 14. September 9, 2006.