Will musicians ever be replaced by robots?

A Quora user asks whether artificial intelligence will ever replace human musicians. TL;DR No.

If music composition and improvisation could be expressed as algorithmic rule sets, then human musicians would have reason for concern. Fortunately, music can’t be completely systematized, much as some music theorists would like to believe it can be. Music is not an internally consistent logical system like math or physics. It’s an evolved set of mostly arbitrary patterns of memes. This should be no surprise; music emerges from our consciousness, and our consciousness is an evolved system, not an algorithmic one. We can do algorithmic reasoning if we work really hard at it, but our minds are pretty chaotic and unpredictable, and it isn’t our strong suit. It’s a good thing, too; we may not be so hot at performing algorithms, but we’re good at inventing new possible ones. Computers are great at performing algorithms, but are lousy at inventing new ones.

There are certain components of music that you can represent pretty well using algorithms. We’ve invented some solid rule sets for Western tonal theory and counterpoint, and computers can compose very decent music following those rules. This should come as no surprise if you’ve studied that stuff; writing species counterpoint is just executing an algorithm, and is every bit as tedious as manually doing a bubble sort. David Cope has gone further and data-mined scores by different classical composers to generate more specific and idiosyncratic rule sets. His software can produce extraordinarily convincing new works “by” Bach or Chopin. However, no one is anywhere close to writing software that could invent the kinds of rule sets that Bach or Chopin developed for themselves. And once you move outside of Western Europe’s classical culture, music gets way less rule-based and systematic, and computers get to be way less useful. There’s a neat analogy here to evolution: computers can predict and model it in certain constrained scenarios, but they can’t predict and model the full messiness of the actual biological world. Human musicians have nothing to worry about.