David Cope: 'You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'

"Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one.""

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