A musical tale of two preznits

Class, coolness, modesty, dignity, soul, and chops. Damn, never knew he could actually play.

Compared to… ass-clown with no sense of rhythm and no clue:

Yikes.

Of course, that’s how it works

Enjoyed Hofstader's essay on computer-generated music. His perception seems entirely correct to me, as someone who has spent a lot of time both composing and improvising music.

Most music genres have very rote, rigid formats, and are essentially random variations bounded by the rules of that particular genre. Pop and rock songs are almost entirely formulaic. The rules of classical harmony are quite rigid, and forms like sonatas, symphonies, ballets, and fugues are excruciatingly well-defined– so much so that violating them caused famous scandals (c.f. Beethoven's Ninth, Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, etc.). This hasn't changed very much– good luck getting something on the radio that doesn't fit the "format" of that station. Even "experimental" music has gone through phases of rigid trendiness: serial music and minimalism were formulaic and mechanistic almost by definition. Even "free" 60's jams were extremely programmatic: drums, bass, guitar, 2-chord or 3-chord vamps, and a random assortment of the same old tired blues licks and modes. Same goes for modal jazz. I've spent my life improvising, and the old jazz cliche holds true: "If you make a mistake, just play it twice". I was known as a damned good soloist, and  all I did was let my fingers do random things within the confines of a key or chord progression, and try to visit the dominant note of the chord when it changes, so that it sounded like I meant to do that.

So why can't a computer write music just as well as a human? The things are already writing poetry anyway.