Computational Aesthetics and Music: the Ugly, the Small and the Boring
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Computational Aesthetics and Music: the Ugly, the Small and the Boring Stefano Kalonaris, 1 Toby Gifford, 2 Andrew Brown, 3 1RIKEN AIP, Tokyo 2Monash University, Melbourne 3Griffith University, Brisbane Abstract of musical aesthetics, and the limitations of current compu- Contemporary musical aesthetics, as a field in the hu- tational models in either generating or evaluating them. As manities, does not typically argue for the existence of algorithmically curated content becomes the norm, and tra- aesthetic universals. However, in the field of computa- ditional gate-keeper roles of producers/executives of record tional creativity, universals are actively sought, with a labels are outsourced to AI, it behooves us to recognize the view to codification and implementation. This article socio-political interwinement of music. critiques some statistical and information-based meth- Humans are very proficient in contextualizing creative ods that have been used in computational creativity, in works and in dealing with semiotic cues, while machines particular their application in assessing aesthetic value are notoriously restricted in this regard. Can this gap be of musical works, rather than the more modest claim of filled? Can it help to redefine our objectives and aspirations in stylistic characterization. Standard applications of Zipf’s relation to systems able to be creative or to evaluate creative Law and Information Rate are argued to be inadequate as computational measures of aesthetic value in musical products? styles where noise, repetition or stasis are valued fea- Expanding the argument presented in our previous work, tures. We describe three of these musical expressions, we provide practical examples of computational aesthetic each with its own aesthetic criteria, and examine several evaluation of several pieces belonging to three musical gen- exemplary works for each. Lacking, to date, is a com- res that exemplify the issues faced in this endeavor. These putational framework able to account for socio-political genres are Japanoise (Novak 2013), Microsound (Thomson and historical implications of creative processes. Beyond 2004), and Minimal music. They were chosen specifically quantitative evaluations of artistic phenomena, we ar- because of their divergent sonic characteristics, and because gue for deeper intersections between computer science, they illustrate how artistic processes move beyond the ex- philosophy, history and psychology of art. pressive medium, to invoke socio-political and philosophical concerns. 1 Introduction By questioning traditional definitions of music and by This paper argues that current computational methods for redefining expectations for music experience, these musi- evaluating aesthetic value of musical pieces are too blunt cal genres implicitly undermine aesthetic universals. While to discern instances of creativity which transcend tradi- some (Galanter 2012) persist in associating aesthetic eval- tional notions of universal beauty. This endeavour relates uation with “normative judgments related to questions of to computational systems in the context of both classifica- beauty and taste in the arts” (2012, p.256), we recognize that tion/appreciation (of either human or machine artifacts) and “artworks, especially modern ones, are appreciated for other generation. The gap between aesthetic science and aesthetic reasons besides their aesthetic qualities or beauty” (Leder experience has been discussed in (Makin 2017) while the and Nadal 2014, p. 445). We thus distance ourselves from gap between computational aesthetics and aesthetics in the anachronistic interpretations of aesthetics, and suggest that broader discourse pertaining to the philosophy of art was ad- the notion of beautiful music is obsolete and irrelevant to dressed in a previous paper (Kalonaris and Jordanous 2018). a current discourse in aesthetics and the arts, and we hope Postmodern musical works, for example, often do not con- that this can be acknowledged in the field of computational form to beauty universals and cannot be evaluated by the creativity. current methods used in computational creativity to judge aesthetic value. That is, they can be so radical and novel that 2 Creativity and Aesthetics they have to be considered in their own right. Creativity and aesthetics are intrinsically bound in a feedback It is becoming increasingly important that the field of com- loop whereby the experience of a creative process, object or putational creativity acknowledges the depth and complexity phenomenon is coupled with responses at an affective, sen- This work is licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 sory, and semantic level. These might affect future creative International” licence. acts or the perception of new creative processes/products, and so forth. According to Rhodes (1961), creativity is a 1 synthesis of four necessary relational modes: product, per- long span, e.g., centuries), which are linked to the creative son, process and press (meaning the environment). If this process in sometimes non-trivial ways. In general, the ability true for generating art then it is likely true for evaluating of a system to formulate an aesthetic value judgment will be art. Similar considerations can apply to aesthetics where hereinafter referred to as computational aesthetics (Hoenig meaning depends on context and the complex interaction 2005). of multiple factors. In its historical trajectory from the the- ory of taste and beauty (Hume 1757; Kant 1987) to recent 2.2 Computational Aesthetics discussions about post-digital art and design (Berry and Di- There can be two ways to consider computational aesthetics eter 2015), discussions of aesthetics have ranged from the (Galanter 2012), one catering for human notions of beauty, philosophy of fine art (Hegel 1975), philosophy of criticism the other catering for an emerging machine meta-aesthetics. (Beardsley 1981), art as experience (Dewey 1989) and prag- We will focus on the approaches that have been employed matist aesthetics (Shusterman 2000). It is now widely under- to endow computational systems with the ability to evaluate stood that an artwork does not have an innate, universal and the aesthetic value of both their own or of humans’ creative abstract aesthetic value, but it is instead appreciated in its products. Among these approaches, some have been applied socio-political context. Much of this literature is yet to be to music. These aesthetic measures have been surveyed in acknowledged in the field of computer science (Spratt and El- detail in (Kalonaris and Jordanous 2018), and are based on: gammal 2014). It has been suggested (Shusterman 1997; Bergeron and Lopes 2012) that there are three aesthetic • Information/Complexity Theory (Birkhoff 1933; Bense dimensions in an experience: evaluative, phenomenologi- 1965; Gell-Mann and Lloyd 1996; Schmidhuber 2012), cal/affective and semantic. The latter, which involves a so- with music application such as the Audio Oracle (AO) cial framework that defines expectations, anticipation and (Dubnov, Assayag, and Cont 2007; Surges 2015) preferences, is of particular importance in postmodern and • Fractal Dimension and Geometry (Spehar et al. 2003; den contemporary expressions of art which foreground the con- Heijer and Eiben 2010), which have been applied in (Voss ceptual over the perceptual. Dealing with this aspect can be and Clarke 1978; Manaris et al. 2007) problematic in the context of computational creativity, a do- • Psychology and Gestalt (Berlyne 1960; Narmour 1990), main which intersects both computer and cognitive sciences, tested and used in (Eisenberg and Thompson 2003; Brown, philosophy, and the creative arts. Gifford, and Davidson 2015) 2.1 Computational Creativity • Grammar. For example, the Generative Theory of Tonal Technologies have afforded us enormous expressive and aes- Music (GTTM) (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), although thetic scope, enabling novel art forms and practices to emerge. not specifically developed for aesthetic considerations However, it seems that when considering the creativity of (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1992), has been implicitly dis- computational systems or their ability to judge creative prod- cussed in relation to aesthetics with practical computa- ucts, more restrictive criteria are often employed. In large part, tional implementations (Hamanaka, Hirata, and Tojo 2006; a system is a by-product of its designer, implicitly embedding 2016) her aesthetic/artistic objectives and preferences. To a large • Biology/Evolution Theory, which include agent-based sys- extent, the system’s architecture (Gifford et al. 2018) will tems and have been applied to music in (Eigenfeldt, Bown, determine its creative potential. For example, a corpus-based and Casey 2015; Blackwell 2007) system operating primarily in combinational and exploratory • Connectionism/Neural Networks. Systems using this methods, will exhibit mostly p-creativity (Boden 1991). Simi- paradigm have architectures particularly apt to aesthetic larly, this system’s generative output will be evaluated (either discrimination, albeit based on corpora similarity or re- by humans or by automated analysis) as a function of similar- ward rules. Music applications are many and increasingly ity and pertinence to the corpus it is supposed to emulate. It ubiquitous (Eck and Schmidhuber 2002; Mehri et al. 2016; is difficult to envisage instances of true transformational and Hutchings and McCormack 2017; Hadjeres, Pachet, and historical creativity (Boden 1991) for