Computer program by composer David Cope that composes original music in the style of various composers by identifying patterns in their compositions. These composers include Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Igor Stravinsky and Scott Joplin. Intriguingly, Cope's computer-generated music has fooled many people, including musical experts, into believing it was actually written by these composers. Reactions to this music, which many consider creative and even deeply emotional, range from fascination to loathing. Artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter has made the following comment about a book written by Cope, titled Experiments in Musical Intelligence:
"In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computed patterns of notes?
"Despite the fact that Cope’s vision of human creativity is radically different from my own, I admire enormously what he has achieved."
In Hofstadter's 1979 book
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, for which he won the
Pulitzer Prize, he expresses his deeply held belief that no program which posesses anything less than the intelligence of a human will ever create original music worth listening to.