If old classic music is only known from the music sheet, why is music interpreted by a musician rater than be played by a computer?
In: Technology
As advanced as computers are, we do not have computers that can accurately simulate what it sounds like when a human being plays an instrument. Yes they can get close, but there are a thousand tiny variables that distinguish the sound of a computer emulating say, a violin, versus an actually person playing one.
We ask trained musicians to interpret the music because they will either A). Interpret it in the closest possible way to what it originally sounded like or B). Provide a new and interesting interpretation on the music allowing for new discoveries and meanings.
It’s like the difference between reading Shakespeare with text to speak or getting someone like Sir Ian McKellen to read it, yes they’re both technically saying the exact same thing, but the inclusion of differences in tones and emphasis and passion in the latter make it like a completely different performance.
Because a computer can’t convey the emotion in a piece of music. Much like the visual difference in writing normal block letters and cursive writing. The style and shape of each letter (or note) tells the story.
Sheet music, especially old, doesn’t give exact instructions. Like if it says “allegro”, that’s not telling you the exact speed at which to play it, it’s just telling you generally the speed of which it’s supposed to be played. A computer wouldn’t know how to interpret the general instructions to know how to play it right. It could just guess and it would sound flat.
Well, computers being able to read sheet music is a relatively recent thing, but yes, computers can read sheet music and can even [write completely new pieces of music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA03iyI3yEA).
However, instruments are complicated and human ears are *very* sensitive. You aren’t just listening for a pure tone – each note contains a mixture of overtones and even other non-tonal sounds like key clicks that make up an instrument’s *timbre* (pronounced “TAM-bur”), which is the quality of the sound that makes a trumpet sound different than a clarinet even when they’re both playing the same note. So from a purely practical standpoint, although I’m sure with enough work a computer could simulate an instrument with enough detail that it would be *practically* indistinguishable from the real thing, that just isn’t really something computers are capable of doing easily right now. And of course, since instruments are built around the human body you can’t really make a device to play them, especially wind instruments that rely on things like lips.
Computer generated music just *cannot* currently replicate all of those other sounds that give the music a richness or fullness. That’s also why human performers avoid using [electric instruments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBJjL-NV1U) unless they very specifically want the sound of an electric instrument. Again, there’s nothing inherently superior about classical instruments, they’re just *different*. They can do a lot of things that classical instruments can’t do (as evidenced in the linked video) but they absolutely 100% sound different.
Moreover, all of those things that make an instrument’s timbre also contribute to making a performance that seems *real*. Music isn’t ever perfectly performed. There are always small sounds that make each performance entirely unique. It could be the key clicks or breaths or paper rustling as pages are turned. It’s the unique way the music echoes through the venue. It’s the harmonics of the sound waves not being perfectly in phase together. There are also minute changes to the performance, like how fast or slow the beat is, how quickly they change the beat as they *accelerando*, or how loud or soft each individual instrument is as part of the whole ensemble.
I’m not saying all this like there’s some magical quality about a human performer that makes the music better, I mean this all very practically – you can hear the difference. And, yeah personally I’m saying human performers are superior. They *do* have the richness that makes the music sound more real. So while a computer *can* play the music with perfect accuracy…music isn’t about perfect accuracy.
Because certain instructions on the sheet music are not precise enough for computers to interpret. In particular, the soft/loud indications and the tempo indications (in modern music it’s common to numerically specify a tempo, but classical music usually only has a descriptive specification rather than numeric).
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