阅读理解新增文章讲义【我也能成为巴赫与群众演员的人生】阅读理解新增文章讲义【我也能成为巴赫与群众演员的人生】.doc

III Be Bach【我也能成为巴赫】 Composer David Cope is the inventor of a computer program that writes original works of classical music. It took Cope 30 years to develop the software. Now most people cant tell the difference between music by the famous German composer J. S. Bach (1685--1750) and the Bach-like compositions from Copes computer. It all started in 1980 in the United States, when Cope was trying to write an opera. He was having trouble thinking of new melodies, so he wrote a computer program to create the melodies. At first this music was not easy to listen to. What did Cope do? He began to rethink how human beings compose music. He realized that composers brains work like big databases. First, they take in all the music that they have ever heard. Then they take out the music that they dislike. Finally, they make new music from what is left. According to Cope, only the great composers are able to create the database accurately, remember it, and form new musical patterns from it. Cope built a huge database of existing music. He began with hundreds of works by Bach. The software analyzed the data: it broke it down into smaller pieces and looked for patterns. It then combined the pieces into new patterns. Before long, the program could compose short Bach-like works. They werent good, but it was a start. Cope knew he had more work to do - he had a whole opera to write. He continued to improve the software. Soon it could analyze more complex music. He also added many other composers，including his own work, to the database. A few years later, Copes computer program, called Emmy ,was ready to help him with opera. The process required a lot of collaboration between the composer and Emmy. Cope listened the computers musical ideas and used the ones that he liked. With Emmy, the opera took only weeks to finish. It was called Cradle Falling, and it was a great success! Cope received some of best reviews of his career, but no one knew exactly how he had composed the work. Since