[On fugues and functionalism]
Around 1960, Walter Reitman of the Complex Information Processing
group at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon
University) made tape recordings with his co-investigator Marta Sánchez
‘thinking aloud’, as an unnamed experimetnal subject composed a fugue at
the piano keyboard. Reitman used protocol analysis to mine the 150-page
transcript of this recording, seeking design inspiration for a new
computer model of ‘human information-processing’—Argus—which was
intended to complement the then-recent work of his colleagues Herbert
Simon and Allen Newell on the General Problem Solver. I relate and
contextualise this unusual historical case, which shows how Western art
music composition was used in the experimental systems of early 1960s AI
research as a proxy for so-called ‘ill-defined problems’ and as an
apodeictic demonstration of supposed algorithmic creativity. With the
release of the Google ‘Bach doodle’ in March 2019, little appears to
have changed in how high culture is mobilised in the rhetoric that
surrounds AI systems.