Do computers dream of human beats?

I, Robot

On Sunday I met  a friend who had some sort of new Apple iPhone and his proudest app (yes, the one which will save humanity) was one which allowed him to sample a voice which can then be auto-snchronised with music generated by the phone. All well and good (and I rather liked saying 'Where's Captain Kirk', an old Spizzenergi punk classic and having random notes assigned) and I thought little more about this until this morning when the Guardian newspaper in the UK carried the story that the London Symphony Orchestra had agreed to play "Transits - into an Abyss", a composition written by Iamus. The twist? Iamus is a computer programme. Francisco Vico, leader of the team a the University of Malaga  who devised Iamus, named after the son of Apollo who could understand the language of birds, explains that using algorithms:

"Iamus generates an initial population of compositions automatically" adding "but their genomes are so simple that they barely develop into a handful of notes lasting just a few seconds" ..... "as evolution proceeds, mutations alter the content and size of this primordial genetic material and we get longer and more elaborate pieces. All the research team inputs is an approximate length and the instruments to be used (emphasis added). But they did, of course, create the original Iamus programme.

Likened to Bartok, Ligeto and Penderecki, the work will be streamed live from Malaga to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of  the father of modern computing Alan Turing, with a CD planned for September.  The programme can 'compose' and also produce variations of well known pieces or merge compositions. 

This Blog has asked its loyal and wonderful readership probing questions before - perhaps pertinently enquiring if  a monkey can be the "author" of a photograph (Aurelia J Schultz's most excellent blog Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey get copyright too? and Jeremy's blog here) which generated some excellent comments - and I wondered if anyone out there would like to add anything on the the idea of a computer programme self generating original music as an 'author' in light of the above - views from Europe post Infopaq and from other different jurisdictions would be most welcome. I've started it off - from a Brit's perspective!

More on Iamus here http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jul/01/iamus-computer-composes-classical-music?newsfeed=true and here  http://www.lswn.it/aggregator/sources/8