Musical Robot

This morning I remembered something I had read a long time ago, in the 90's I was certain. Something about a computer that you could feed scores from Bach, for instance, and it would search for patterns and create works that were reasonably close to the same style. You could feed the program an Indonesian folk tune, and it would spit out a rendition of how Bach might have treated the melody. I remember downloading midi files that were produced by the program. The files were utterly mechanical, but a machine encoding of a real score would be too, I reasoned. This led me to wonder where the music as such actually appeared. I've made attempts at classical guitar from time to time, and it seems that you must make some sort of feeling, or heart sense of the score. Something that assumes a human sort of emotion on the part of the creator. So one senses, if the music turned like this it would have to feel this way. You put this sense of how human emotions would work into the score, so that maybe the music as such was actually from the performer rather than the composer. This morning, it occurred to me that this emotional structure is a pattern as well, and so it should be possible to analyze and reproduce in the same manner as Bach's style. I wondered if anyone had done anything more with this music composing program since. It seems that it is now possible to imitate the external surface of all human productions, (art, science, math, conversation, etc.), with increasing perfection. The inner experience of seeing, feeling, playing perhaps eludes, but how much substance does this have?

(I discovered the program through the miracle of Google in one not particularly good search. It was called Experiments in Musical Intelligence or EMI, and created by David Cope. A link to an article about it on the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm ).