Abstract

Music, creativity, and computers: what could these possibly have to do with one another? “Nothing!,” many people would say. Creativity is a marvel of the human mind, and music is a special case. But computers, with all due apologies to Mario, Sonic, and friends, are basically just tincans. It follows—doesn’t it?—that creativity (whether musical or not) and computers are related only by utter incompatibility. Well, no. Computers and creativity make interesting partners with respect to two different projects. One, which interests me the most, is understanding human creativity. The other is trying to produce machine creativity—or anyway, machine “creativity”—in which the computer at least appears to be creative, to some degree.