On our way to and from the wedding we attended last weekend, my wife and I made the time pass by listening to episodes of Radio Lab she had burned to CD.

In particular, an episode from Season 2 entitled Musical Language struck my interest. In its three parts they speak about how a repeated speech loop, when repeated enough, will end up sounding somewhat musical, with the various changes in intonation used in the phrase; how language and music are interrelated, and how speakers of tonal languages (such as Mandarin) have a significantly higher rate of perfect pitch than speakers of non-tonal languages (such as English); and how composer David Cope, while going through a creativity dry spell, created a computer program called EMI to help him through it.

From the Radio Lab site:

His program, named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), deconstructs the works of great composers, finding patterns within the voice leading of their compositions, and then creates brand new compositions based on the patterns she finds. But it’s not just copy and paste. She brings something new to the pieces. Drift along to the eerily enchanting music of EMI Mahler and ask yourself this: What would Mahler think of an EMI Mahler score? Brillant music? A forgery?

Anyway, it was a fascinating episode, and I started wondering what EMI would come up with if I were to feed it scores of music (if in fact I *had* my music written up on scores, which I do not. It is all mainly scribbled into various notebooks).