Dear Lauri,
I was lucky enough to spend a week with the UPIC many years ago, and (together with a team) put together a composition of around 5 minutes or so - at the time the UPIC was a rare and expensive item that took about 3 months to ship and set up; I'm not sure whether it has become cheaper with time. I hesitate to say "composed" regarding the piece, since it is not really an act of composition, at least in the way I understood it both before and since - in truth, I'm not sure at all what it was.
The process of composition for "meta" music such as this (and maybe we should include concrete / tape splicing music in this) is, based on my somewhat hazy memory of those experiences, a much more intellectual process than "regular" composition - and, I suspect, much more influenced by happy mistakes. I remember I had more the sense that "I draw this, it sounds like that, I influence it this way, play it, like it, sounds good, move on to the next thing". It's not the way I am accustomed to composing in the normal scheme of things - I normally know what sound I want to make, and influence the instruments to achieve that. Maybe it was because I only did it for a week...
William - with the greatest and genuine respect - I believe that you are wrong to be overly concerned about the role of the composer in all of this to the extent that we should increase the role by allowing them to change additional parameters etc. If we are to set aside the role of the performer in this discussion (and I think we are, because it really has not been mentioned so far), that will be because the performer is simply a conduit of the music. If that is the case, then so is the composer a conduit of the composition. The composition is definitely the important item in the equation. Therefore, a more efficient conduit (sad as that may seem for the humanists) is more effective, even if that involves diminishing or even removing the composer. I'm not saying I like it, but I'm not sure what place the composer has in the discussion, other than a chap who arbitrarily selects stuff based on their own preferences - which means the composer is almost irrelevant. And in computer-generated music, perhaps this is the way it should be.
What is significantly more difficult to achieve through computers is the very thing that Lauri (naturally) eschews - cliche. The cliches that have been built up from the point since people were banging on rocks in a rhythmic manner. At the moment, there is limited ability to draw on these programmatically without something approaching a collage being put together - a sequence of programmed "usual solutions".
It raises an interesting consideration though - perhaps we are viewing automatically generated music such as the piece by Lauri in a positive light ONLY because we are viewing it through our cliche-ridden ears. Without this backdrop of cliches that we are so familiar with, we almost certainly would not have a set of criteria to base critical opinion on - to be able to say "this sounds pleasant, that sounds incompetent".
Sorry for the ramble - its an interesting subject.
Kind Regards,
Nick.