LIGHT IMAGE IMAGINATION | 77 CHAPTER 6 Computer-Aided Musical Imagination

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects differentiating humans from other animals is the fact that we are inherently musical. Our compulsion to listen to and appreciate sound arrangements beyond the mere purposes of linguistic communication is extraordinary. From the discovery almost three thousand years ago of the direct relationship between the pitch of a note and the length of a string or pipe to the latest computer models of human musical cognition and intelligence, composers have increasingly looked to science to provide new and challenging ways to study and compose music. Music is generally associated with the artistic expression of emotions, but it is clear that reason plays an important role in music making. For example, the ability to recognise musical patterns and to make structural abstractions and associations requires sophisticated memory mechanisms, involving the conscious manipulation of concepts and subconscious access to intuitive knowledge. One of the finest examples of early rational approaches to music composition appeared in the 11th century, when Guido d’Arezzo proposed a lookup chart for assigning pitch to the syllables of religious hymns. He also invented the musical stave for systematic notation of music and established the medieval music scales known as the church modes. Any attempt at distinguishing the rational from the intuitive in musical composition needs to take into account the music technology of the time. Between d’Arezzo’s charts and the first compositional computer programs that appeared in the early 1950s, countless systematisations of music for com-position purposes were proposed. The use of the computer as a composition tool thus continues the tradition of Western musical thought that was initi-ated approximately a thousand years ago. The computer is a powerful tool for the realisation of abstract design constructs, enabling composers to create musical systematisations and judge whether they have the potential to pro