The work of David Cope (his website here), referenced by Douglas Hofstadter in his Singularity talk I posted earlier, merits its own post. David’s EMI (Experiements in Music Intelligence) platform can emulate music composition built on a database of musical scores from a given composer or musical style. It opens up a number of very interesting questions about the nature of creativity, authorship, and design in the context of computational mediation. I love David’s characterization of the EMI software as a “foil” to his own creative process. Here is an article on the history of his work.
Here is piece that Radiolab did on his work:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91515-musical-dna/
a Bach-like piece composed by EMI:
and some more in-depth interviews with David:
softsentience 