- Friday, 17 July 2009
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My wife and I were fighting like hammer and tongs. She won, she had the hammer - Tommy Cooper
Computers make rubbish musicians
HUMANS can tell the difference if a piece of music is being played by a computer or a fellow mortal, a top German shrink claims.
Stefan Koelsch hooked 20 people to an encephalogram and forced them to listen to piano sonatas played by human musicians and computers.
While the original human recordings prompted listeners to react by sweating, the computerised versions failed to move them.
This seems to prove that volunteers who listened to recordings of professional pianists showed more emotional activity than did those who listened to recordings made by computer.
It suggested that musicians actually tell us something when they play, Koelsch said.
It also proves that the more electronic music gets, with less input from real musicians, the less soul it has. Living proof that plastic bands such as Girls Aloud should be drowned for the sake of humanity, if you needed such evidence. µ
L'Inq
Wired
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WOWZERS what a profound revelation, how much does this guy get payed for such ground breaking research ?? O_O

*note,

research results not applicable to fruity shiny music player/mobile toys :O)
Are you being serious? Girls Aloud are NOT plastic. They are very talented girls, all 5 of them. Hence the reason they won a TALENT show. They're amazing live singers.
Don't strip me off of House, Trance and Drum n' Bass.
People get paid for these studies? I thought it was common knowledge! It was long ago discovered that it's the imperfections in timing, pauses, and various other "inaccuracies" which give music it's character. In fact MIDI sequencers account for this by allowing you to tweak this... You can quantize all the notes and their durations to mechanical perfection, or "fix" them by only 50% or not at all.
...try reading the actual study. Both Wired and you guys completely hosed this.

The study is about how people react to expected, somewhat unexpected, and VERY unexpected chord progressions. Basically, the human brain has a tendency to expect certain sounds to come after certain other ones; do it right and the brain's happy. Alter it a little and you can make the brain REALLY happy, but screw it up TOO much and the brain gets very sad indeed.

The study has nothing to do with whether computers make lousy musicians. The mention of that was in passing, and in reference to raw plonk-plonk-plonk playbacks of note sequences used in other studies, and was there to highlight differences in study methodologies, not to say "computers can't play music".

But hey, might as well pick the funnier headline. What does truth have to do with journalism, anyway?