Originally Posted by Pedestrian

You're comparing apples and oranges. The Beatles can't do what Bach did. The Beatles didn't do what Sonic Youth did. It's all relative.

The Beatles are a particularly poor example, because they wrote pop music (a lot of which was pretty average), which technically speaking, all of mainstream music is doing today. I'm not denying their influence, but you can't hold influence against today's artists, because you can't foresee the effect they will have on music over the coming decades, or generations.

The production studio is but another instrument to play. There is no computer that can "write music for an artist". What we know as music is vibrations of air molecules that our brain interprets a thousand different ways and pieces together into what we know as a "song". Music doesn't enter your ear, only differing vibrations do. Music is a product of the brain.

It takes a person to write music, and a person to hear it. A person can use a computer as an instrument on which to perform music, but a computer cannot write music.



If a computer can't even distinguish between the hundreds of different sounds that may comprise any one song, how can it be expected to compile them into anything resembling music without a human being involved in the process?

It is easier these days for a single person to produce and perform all of the parts on an album using modern technology and the recording studio as an instrument, but it is no easier to write the song (the melody, the lyrics, the harmonies, the arrangements, etc.) itself.