For those near a radio tomorrow morning Prof Trevor Cox is exploring whether we can consider computers as having the ability to be creative. His programme “Can a Computer Write Shakespeare?” will be broadcast on Thursday morning (15 May 2014) at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4, or you can listen online at the link given.

“Trevor Cox asks whether computers can ever be truly creative.

An old adage says that a monkey sitting at a typewriter could eventually write Shakespeare. By the same token, could a computer ever create a work of art that could match Shakespeare’s creativity?”

He’s also written a blog post “Can computers compose?” which talks about software used to create pieces of music, including a piece called ‘Adsum’ that had a full orchestral arrangement and premiere (see the video on Trevor’s blog).

For a more unplugged way of creating music have a look at Howard Goodall’s episode on Melody from his ‘How Music Works‘ series. In the video below (from 12min 54sec but Howard introduces the piece a few seconds before that) he asks people at a shopping mall to pick numbers from a bag and uses these to determine which notes to play on the piano, resulting in a piece of crowdsourced music.