Might FTS or a program like it one day become a composer in its own right?
Okay, this is a somewhat philosophical question, but its one that arises for some FTS users. So I think it’s fair to address it here. Some composers are so impressed by FTS’s capabilities that they can envisage it or a successor of the program replacing the composer altogether. However the way FTS in particular composes has its limitations, and there are also theoretical reasons for supposing that a computer program can never replace human reasoning – not if programmed in the normal fashion in a computer language. I see it as a useful tool for composers, and in the future some composers may work with programs like this more and more, but I don’t see it ever becoming a composer in its own right. But see what you think. First, I agree FTS is sometimes astonishingly successful and human like in the tunes it produces. Take as an example the “Beautiful 13 limit melody” – I think if I hadn’t heard FTS before and was told that this was a piece by a human composer, I’d have believed it. Howeve
