Could computers replace composers?

Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College London contends that music evolves "We don't often think of music as evolving, but everybody knows it has a history and it has traditions. But if you think about it, it really has evolved, it is changing continuously" and as a result of music being evolutionary he believes that human composers may not be a necessary part of composition. Dr Robert MacCallum has been testing the idea out with a computer program. Initially "The notes are in any place, in any order, and the types of sound - the instrument - is completely randomly generated as well" in two pieces and the noise/music is allowed to reproduce recombining and mixing up material as well as adding some random mutations. This was done until there were 100 random tunes at which point volunteers were asked to rate the pieces and the more popular ones were the ones allowed to reproduce. The result was that the music rapidly improved. "After about 3,000 generations had been listened to, there starts to be a kick drum or a bass drum, and that just spontaneously came, we didn't put any drum sounds into the algorithm." Although the experiment did not last long enough to create any really good music Dr MacCallum says "I've no doubt that if we ran this experiment for longer, using bigger, faster computers, and millions of people rather than thousands, and for years, instead of months, we could evolve fantastic music."

Your views; could computer evolved music ever be as good as Mozart or the Beatles?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18449939

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/19/evolutionary-music-d...