[PavlovsCat]

As I said already, MIDI is kind of crude and hardly the last word. The description can be as detailed as the brain of the composer can handle it. The acts of composition and performance are indistinguishable. You could even manually set the amplitude of 44100 (or more) points per second if you wanted to... arguably the musicians that can make full use of the possibilities that exist even now haven't even been born yet.

Someone else made a very good point about paintings, and you kind of missed it by saying computers can't paint like Da Vinci or Shakespeare -- of course they can't, just like a brush or a pencil can't, and just like a piano can't compose. Do reprints of Shakespeare's work have soul in your opinion? And do they have more, less, or just as much soul than exact reproductions of his original handwriting? Is it possible to communicate soul by typing as we do right now, or would we have to see and smell the hands doing the typing for that, and heads pausing in reflection? Can a photo made with a DSLR and tweaked in a RAW converter have soul? Can a big format analogue photograph? What resolution does soul have, what resolution does our perception of it have? If facial expressions convey soul, does imperfection of sight reduce the amount of soul being communicated? Why does a piano piece that can move one human deeply leave another completely cold? Why can a landscape, even one devoid of plants and animals, make the soul sing, why does soul get perceived where none was put into? If it's because God created it, how does this not apply to computers as well? So many questions ^^

[bane]

He's making a more fundamental mistake, borne by his lack of emotional range.

He's arguing that every poem cannot have a soul, only during the recitation of a poem, by a live performer, can the work take on the kind of soulful meaning.

Yet this criteria, a human must perform art for it to have a soul, eliminates all non-performance art. Painting, sculpture, etc. all has no soul.

Yet this is obviously not true. A great painting has soul just as much as any other art.

So what happens when you have a poem, crafted as a sculpture? We've already determined that sculptures have a "soul", therefore something like this http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ-aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANW... has a soul, but no human performed it. The emotional connection is made via the writer and the sculpture (who may even be the same person). Yet, no human can "perform" this sculpture.

In cases like the OP, the music we have here is no different than a sculpture of the composer's intention. No human performs it, yet it's no less valid than if it was written down for an orchestra of painists to perform.

[john61]

Do you know and understand the painting "This is not a pipe" by Margritte?

[bane]

That painting hangs in pretty much every independent coffee shop and cafe in probably 50 countries.

[john61]

Great, and what does it mean?

[bane]

You've got to be kidding me. It means it's a painting, not an actual pipe. And by extension, other representational art is not what it represents but something else. But it doesn't matter to you, because the painting is not being performed by a human, and is the same every time you look at it, therefore it, you claim, it doesn't have a soul.

[john61]

A painting exists to moment it is drawn and it is persistent more or less for at least a few hundred years. Music on the other hand is ordered vibration of air molecules (and this is something different than a composition, hence the pipe example). These vibrations are vanishing immediately. Therefore a painting does not have to be performed like music.

Every form of human art has a soul, a painting, or the actually played music. Computer made "art" does not have a soul, although it may have the same physical structure than a human made one.

[john61]

We are talking about MIDI sequences that are not producible by humans. If no human can produce those sequences, how can they have human soul?