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The Mozart in the Machine

Sometime in the coming decades, an external system that collects and analyzes biometric data (生物特征数据) will probably be able to understand what’s going on in my body and in my brain much better than me. What will it do to art? Will art remain humanity’s last line of defense against the rise of the all-knowing algorithms (算法)?

In the modem world art is usually associated with human emotions. We tend to think that artists are controlling internal psychological forces, and that the whole purpose of art is to connect us with our emotions or to inspire in us some new feeling. Consequently, when we come to evaluate art, we tend to judge it by its emotional impact and to believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In 1952, the composer John Cage composed a musical piece 4’33’’ This piece consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds during which no instrument plays anything. The piece encourages the audience to observe their inner experiences in order to examine what music is and what we expect of it. The message is that it is our own expectations and emotions that define music.

If art is defined by human emotions, what might happen once external algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Shakespeare, Picasso or Lennon? After all, emotions are not some mysterious forces — they are a biochemical process. Therefore, given enough biometric data and enough computing power, it might be possible to hack (入侵) love, hate, boredom and joy.

Of all forms of art, music is probably the most sensitive to Big Data analysis, because the inputs are the mathematical patterns of soundwaves, and the outputs are the electrochemical signals. Allow a learning machine to go over millions of musical experiences, and it will learn how particular inputs result in particular outputs.

Therefore, in the long run, algorithms may learn how to compose entire tunes, playing on human emotions as if they were a piano keyboard. Using your personal biometric data, the algorithms could even produce personalized melodies, which you alone in the entire world would appreciate.

Will this result in great art? That depends on the definition of art. If beauty is indeed in the ears of their listener, then biometric algorithms stand a chance of producing the best art in history. If art is about something deeper than human emotions, biometric algorithms might not make very good artists. But nor would most humans. In order to enter the art market, algorithms won’t have to begin by straight away beating Beethoven. It is enough if they outperform Justin Bieber.