"Hello World!" is a piece of

contemporary classical music Contemporary classical music is classical music composed close to the present day. At the beginning of the 21st century, it commonly referred to the post-1945 modern forms of post-tonal music after the death of Anton Webern, and included seria ...

for clarinet-violin-piano trio composed by Iamus Computer in September 2011. It is arguably the first full-scale work entirely composed by a computer without any human intervention and automatically written in a fully-fledged score using conventional

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation fo ...

. Iamus generates music scores in

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

and the

MusicXML MusicXML is an XML-based file format for representing Western musical notation. The format iopen fully documented, and can be freely used under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement. History MusicXML was invented by Michael Good and ini ...

format that can be imported in professional editors such as

Sibelius Jean Sibelius ( ; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...

and Finale.

Title

The title makes reference to the computer program

Hello World ''Hello'' is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826. Early uses ''Hello'', with that spelling, was used in publications in the U.S. as early as the 18 October 1826 edition of the ''Norwich C ...

, which is traditionally used to teach the most essential aspects in a programming language.

Dedication

The composition is dedicated to the memory of

Raymond Scott Raymond Scott (born Harry Warnow; September 10, 1908 – February 8, 1994) was an American composer, band leader, pianist, record producer, and inventor of electronic instruments. Though Scott never scored cartoon soundtracks, his music is ...

, an electronic music pioneer and inventor of the

Electronium The Electronium, created by Raymond Scott, is an early combined electronic synthesizer and algorithmic composition / generative music machine. Its place in history is unusual, because while in intention it is analogous to the digital algorithmic c ...

Premiere

"Hello World!" was given its premiere performance on October 15, 2011 by Trio Energio at the Keroxen music festival in

Santa Cruz de Tenerife Santa Cruz de Tenerife, commonly abbreviated as Santa Cruz (), is a city, the capital of the island of Tenerife, Province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and capital of the Canary Islands. Santa Cruz has a population of 206,593 (2013) within its admi ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

. The performers were

Cristo Barrios Cristo Barrios (born 30 May 1976 in Tenerife, Spain) is a Spanish clarinetist, soloist and chamber musician. Biography Spanish clarinettist Cristo Barrios is recognized as one of the most exciting clarinettists of his generation. Future highligh ...

(clarinet), Cecilia Bercovich (violin), and Gustavo Díaz-Jerez (piano).

Reception

As supported by neuroscientific studies, critiques of "Hello World!" (and similarly created works) could potentially be affected by anti-computer prejudice, derived from the fact of knowing in advance (or not) the non-human nature of the author. The music critic

Tom Service Tom Service (born 8 March 1976) is a British writer, music journalist and television and radio presenter, who has written regularly for ''The Guardian'' since 1999 and presented on BBC Radio 3 since 2001. He is a regular presenter of The Proms f ...

of ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' acknowledged as much in his review of a 2012 performance, writing, "Now, maybe I'm falling victim to a perceptual bias against a faceless computer program but I just don't think ''Hello World!'' is especially impressive." He continued: Despite describing the piece as "more successful than previous attempts to produce generic musical compositions from computers," he added, "The real paradox of Iamus is why it's being used to attempt to fool humanity in this way. If you've got a computer program of this sophistication, why bother trying to compose pieces that a human, and not a very good human at that – well, not a compositional genius anyway – could write? Why not use it to find new realms of sound, new kinds of musical ideas?" Conversely, the musicologist Peter Russell was asked to review "Hello World!" for the BBC, based on a video of the live premiere, but he was not given any information about the composer. In his critique, Russell writes "on listening to this delightful piece of chamber music I could not bring myself to say that it would probably be more satisfying to read the score than listen to it. In fact after repeated hearings, I came to like it".

References

External links