Agreed. Moreover, if a genuinely sentient AI or MI as Minsky called it, comes to pass then it would then be fascinating to listen to it if it cared to compose music; in its absence musical composition is always the result of someone's human experience of being in this universe - necessarily as a human organism. And this is true even if the music is a research exploration of evocative (to a human of course) sound patterns.
> if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software.
As an instrumentalist, I would love to believe this but more and more this does not appear to be the case.
I have talked to many people of different ages who really don't see any difference between someone actually playing an instrument in front of you and listening to pre-recorded music.
It's funny because it's in the context of me liking to play live music, and they never seem to realize they're saying, "What you do is meaningless."
I think it's that they have no personal experience with playing an instrument, combined with the fact that the dominant forms of pop music now don't have much if any place for instrumentalists.
Nobody is talking about playing music. And physical playing has been replaced by software quite a while ago. Not if you play it for your own fun, but almost nobody can distinguish a computer rendering from the real thing on a recording.
