Interview with Marvin Minsky

Author(s): C. Roads and Marvin Minsky

Source: Computer Music Journal, Vol. 4, No. 3, Artificial Intelligence and Music Part 2
(Autumn, 1980), pp. 25-39
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679636
Accessed: 19-04-2018 13:08 UTC

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Computer Music Journal

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C. Roads
Interview with
Marvin Minsky

Introduction forced me into science. Because, instead of playing

this dreadful sport I would make friends with the
Marvin L. Minsky is Donner Professor of Science at nature counselor and spend the corresponding after-
M.I.T. He is one of the founders of artificial intel- noons classifying butterflies and all that sort of
ligence (AI), and for many years headed M.I.T.'s stuff. So, I suppose everything all links up. Then I
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, one of the na- went to the High School of Science and Harvard
tion's leading laboratories in this field. He is a College and got interested in mathematics, physics,
recipient of the Association for Computing Ma- and went to graduate school in mathematics at
chiner's (ACM) Turing Award. Princeton. I suppressed music for a very long time, I
This interview took place the afternoon of 31 think. As I recall, every year or two I would learn a
May 1980 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beethoven Sonata or something like that, working
intensely on it for a month or so and then put it
aside for less important things or more important
Early Interests things, depending on your view.
Roads: So at some point you had music lessons and
Roads: Tell me a little bit about your early educa- studied traditional music as well?
tion, your childhood and all that sort of thing. Minsky: I had sporadic music lessons but I was an
Minsky: Oh yes, well, O.K.! I had a great childhood, improvisor, and still am, and never really disci-
as far as I can remember. When I was a child I was plined myself to practice and learn other people's
interested in all sorts of things and music was one music very well. I took several courses in college
of them. We had an Ampeco player piano and I from Irving Fine, who was a rather gifted and fe-
guess that was a great thing. So, I used to imitate rocious critic. He died a while ago. I took some
what the player piano did and then I discovered courses in music but generally they didn't make
that if you stuck pins in the paper you could get much difference because the counterpoint I could
more notes and I made a few little pieces, mostly write without doing the exercises was better than
on the leader, which was never long enough to doing the exercises. Now I see that if I had stuck to
make much of a piece; there were never any blank it and learned to control things and do them then I
rolls. But anyway, that was sort of constrained be- could be a composer and, as it is, I can't. I can be an
cause it was pretty hard to erase. improviser and one of the reasons I am interested in
Roads: At some point you started developing inter- computer music is the possibly false hope that with
ests in more technical areas, more scientific areas. suitable analysis and editing programs I can take
Minsky: I think they are probably connected be- these compositions that I make, that I like very
cause I went to summer camp and one of the thingsmuch, and could fix them without going through
you had to do in summer camp was play baseball. the I discipline that a formal composer on paper
tried it once or twice but what happens in baseball does. Now, I stick to that illusion, although in fact
is that the ball smashes into your finger and you when I do transcribe one of my pieces and put it on
can't play the piano for a long time so that's what paper and try to improve it usually anything I do to
change it causes strange and obscure consequences
in the rest of the piece and that in fact I don't know
Computer Music Journal, Vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 1980, how to hold the whole thing in my head together at
0148-9267/80/020025-15 $04.00/0 once in such an organized way. So, I expect that
when we finally get our very good music editing

Roads 25

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program working it won't help me very much. But computer science by looking at computer circuits
that is beside the point. with the extra handicap that nobody actually knew
what the circuits were. When you look at
neurons...

Early Work on Intelligence Roads: It's like being a DEC serv

understand ...
Roads: I notice that you had an early interest in Minsky: Right, it's like being a DEC serviceman
neuron-based notions of intelligence. How do you trying to understand why a Lisp program doesn't
feel about this now? work. There's just no hope!
Minsky: Well, it's a rather interesting story. When Roads:
I Now, going beyond this neuron-based
was in college I began looking for what were the notion...
most interesting problems in the world and the Minsky: To finish the story, I will just skip
most interesting problems seemed to be things like,years of working with colleagues, John McC
How does physics work? There seemed to be plenty Oliver Selfridge, Seymour Papert, and stude
of people working on that. I thought the problems numerous to mention, but who I should b
in genetics were interesting, self-reproduction and many readers have heard of them, on what
so forth, and I thought the notion of how the brain the information-processing approach to cogn
works was probably the most interesting and one science, making models of abstract theories
that people had the least ideas about. I learned heuristic search the first few years then mo
some biology and did some experiments, little to the idea of knowledge-based programs an
nervous systems, but I think the most important the present day. There is just no room here
thing was that I met people like George Miller and an outline of artificial intelligence as it deve
Joe Licklider and Warren McCullough, Rashevsky, in those years, but around the middle seven
and these people who really invented cybernetics in found my mind wandering and feeling, "we
the late 1940s. This was in the late 1940s. I got inter-
we really do have a lot of good theories abou
ested in making my own theory of how brain cells mation semantics." Semantic information
could learn and so there was sort of counterpoint ofphrase because I thought the important thin
working on that and trying to understand modern were going to make intelligent machines wa
mathematics. My other love was algebraic topology there was something funny about the situat
and that sort of part of mathematics. I wasn't inter- the past. In 1961 my student, Jim Slagle, wr
ested in logic at the time; it didn't seem relevant, program that could do calculus, in the sense
strangely enough. And then when I went to gradu- ting a high grade on an M.I.T. freshman calc
ate school I again worked on these two things. I exam. Yet, the thing didn't know what a nu
finally wrote my thesis on "Automata Theory and was, in any real sense. And so, what we learn
Theory of Neural Nets," but the thing that I really those years was that in fact we could get co
studied most was topology and algebra and things to do things that people thought were rathe
like that. Then, somewhere between 1954, when I but, as we saw in Winograd's thesis in 1970,
left Princeton and went to Harvard on a fellowship,we tried to get a computer to play with bloc
and 1957, when the fellowship ended, I gradually was harder. The block-manipulation progra
realized that trying to figure out how the neurons Terry's program is probably more subtle and
compute intelligence isn't the way the liver se- more complicated kinds of knowledge than t
cretes bile; it is some other kind of thing entirely early calculus program of Slagle. I'm skippin
and that, really, in order to understand the problemgreat MACSYMA of Moses, which does kn
one had to have a theory of intelligence and it was great deal about integration. But, again, I do
just a luxury, and a dangerous and distracting one, think it knows what an integral is, in any s
to try to understand physiology at the same time asAnd so, around the middle seventies I began
the process. It would be like trying to understand think again that now AI has made so much p

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that we have choices. We can use this frame theory
that I made up, which is one way of representing
knowledge. We could use the kind of logical theo-
ries that McCarthy and his associates have been
trying to develop for representing knowledge. We
could use the semantic primitives that Roger Schank
and his colleagues have been developing. Within
the semantic network idea, dating all the way back
to Quillian in the middle sixties, there were many
choices. One of my problems was, the students
would come and say, "Well, which is better?" and I
would say, "I don't even know how to start deciding
that question." It's a long story-almost a twenty-
year story-but after writing the frame paper I be-
gan to think, "Well, if we have so many choices,
perhaps it's worth looking back to see what's hap-
pened in the brain sciences and maybe now that
I've done a little bit of what I hoped I could, under-
standing the abstract needs that an intelligent
machine would have to fulfill, maybe it would be
worth going back to look at the nervous system
again." There were several reasons why I think I
leaned in that direction. The work I had done with
Papert had given me a very different view of intel-
ligence, namely the idea that the child constructs
its own intelligence through its development and
so problems are in some ways much easier and in
some ways harder but at least once you have the
developmental idea that children don't do all' the
wonderful things adults do-they do other won-
derful things-the problem might be easier to
approach. Then, the work of one of the students,
Scott Fahlman, on distributed networks, a sort of
successor of Quillian, with better ways to bind vari-
ables, suggested a kind of neural network approach.
In the meantime, in the late sixties, Papert and I
had worked on the theory of perceptrons. In a sense
that might have delayed my return to looking at
the nervous system for a decade because we were
able to prove that at least certain kinds of per-
ceptrons couldn't learn much. So then, around
1977, I started working on ideas of semantic repre-
sentations that were easy to put into things that
looked like neural networks. This doesn't mean
that that's the way the brain works but I found
that, just as Schank found that certain diagrams
were good ways to express his ideas about the rep- could be made out of Schank's atoms or of others?"
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resentation of knowledge, I found these nervous-
network diagrams were a good way for me to ex-
press ideas that I was developing about language
and learning and meaning, things like that. So,
that's the sort of thing I am working on now.
Frames and Conceptual Dependency
Relationships
Roads: What is the relationship between your con-
cept of frames and Schank's conceptual dependency
relationships? Those seem to be, well, two of the
major models.
Minsky: In a way they are opposite poles of some-
thing because Schank's achievement, and I think it
is a very important one, and an especially signifi-
cant one because of the derision that he got from
other psychologists and particularly language scien-
tists, is Schank decided he would make a sort of
chemicallike theory where all meanings would be
assembled from a very small number. I think his
first paper had fourteen primitive concepts of
meaning such as transfer from one place to another
or something causing something, something de-
pending on something in several different ways, and
over a period of a few years he showed interesting
ways to represent all sorts of more complex con-
cepts out of the primitives. So, a Schank diagram
was very much like a large organic chemical mole-
cule which contains only carbon, hydrogen, oxygen
and a handful of others and a variety of kinds of
bonds. I think the best way to describe Schank's the-
ory is that he had a small number of bonds. He was
willing in those days to have lots of different atoms
if necessary but actually did rather well without
them. The frame theory was, in a way, similar but
in a way the opposite. That was the idea that what-
ever they were made of, the rest of the mind wasn't
going to be able to deal with things in that micro-
scopic detail from one moment to another so that
meaningful things had to be assembled into much
larger chunks. So there is absolutely no conflict at
all between these theories. They are very closely re-
lated on different levels and you might say I am
saying, "What are the useful large molecules that
Roads 27
Schank himself has gone also in the same direction traditional logic. Now, my concern with music and
of things that he originally called scripts, which computation really just reemerged in the last few
were large assemblies of his dependency structures. years with this society-of-mind idea. That idea is
So the difference between frames and scripts isn't that there isn't a single central process but that
very precise. Basically, we both have ideas about there are lots of concurrent processes going on in
what properties the larger chunks of knowledge or the mind and I imagine that the mind is like a big
expertise people have and we both envision them, I decentralized company. It has specialists, and in
think, as sort of clouds of structures that have lim- fact in this image, nobody in this structure is really
ited numbers of entries for getting in and out of very good at anything but they all know other peo-
them. However complicated their interiors are. ple who are good at the details of what they are
doing, until finally you get down to trivial ones
which know how to move a finger. Now, there are
Societies of Communicating Experts people who hear that we are working on a society-
of-mind theory and come out with two different
Roads: I assume, then, that "frames" is not some- pictures. One picture is that there is a giant hier-
thing that had all been superseded by the more archy of subroutines and that is one of the ideas
recent notions of societies of communicating that it has and the other idea is that it is sort of like
experts. that story "Sybil" that there are a lot of different
Minsky: No, in fact, the so-called agents in the so- people in your head, each of whom are fully devel-
ciety are framelike structures. Many people have oped. I'm afraid that I mean both of those. While I
complained that the frame idea isn't precise enough was working with Seymour Papert on planning out
for their purposes. But, again, I think this is a mat- ideas of how to do research on a decentralized mind
ter of level. It wasn't so much a specification of I began to look at my own mind and noticed that
what a frame was but a specification of what it when I started improvising seriously again, around
ought to be able to do. And so, one of the things it 1975, that I was much better at it than the last time
ought to be able to do is to give some advice if it I had been seriously involved in music (in the early
doesn't work about some other frame that can sub- 1960s).
stitute. That idea may have first appeared in Pat
Winston's difference network in his thesis, but then
it may go all the way back to the model of the late Improvisation
1950s of Newell and Simon. Another idea which is
very important is the idea of default. If you didn't Roads: That, I think, is a very common musical ex-
know something then you should just assume it. perience-for someone to put down a musical
And so the frame mechanism has this collection of
instrument and come back to it and play it much
defaults. If I tell you that John caught a ball you better.
probably imagine that it was a baseball and that it Minsky: Precisely. I had some tape recordings of
was white, and I didn't say that. The idea of default some old things I had done, I still liked, but I
is that it allows you to make lots of commonsense noticed that around 1975 and 76, when I started im-
inferences, and you can remain sane if you keep provising fugues, that I would get whole sections
track of which things are ones you assume and with nearly perfectly worked-out three-part stuff,
which you were told. The work of Sussman and his and when I went to four-part things then it would
students in the last few years have gone much fur- fall apart but you could see these different things
ther in the direction of building computational operating as though I had been working on the
mechanisms for keeping track of what kinds of as- thing for ten years. I would think about a theme
sumptions your reasoning depends on. That's and three or four days later I would be able to just
another area that has been growing in artificial in- play off a pretty nice little piece using that or some
telligence that distinguishes it a bit from the variations. And, I said to myself, "Well, of course

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we're always used to doing this in mathematics, it's at all, it's just fitting things in as best they can and
just what Poincar6 said, you work on a problem for that little person who's responsible for that voice
a few hours and get tired of it and come back a few evidently is looking at what the others are doing,
days or weeks later and things are in much better just did, or about to do, and it says, "Well I have a
shape." chance to go in the right direction now so I will."
Roads: Is this theory of improvisation a theory of Roads: O.K. There are a couple of things here. First
the kind of behavior that happens when people get of all you described the experience of playing as
together and improvise as opposed to what happens being very distinct from the experience of listening.
inside a single mind? Do you see them as being dif- In my mind, that brings up a notion of multiple
ferent situations or similar situations? representations of the same piece of music.
Minsky: Ah, O.K. That's a great question because Minsky: Right. Well now David Levitt and John
when I said there were sort of two ends of this idea Amuedo and Bill Kornfeld and a group of people
of the mind as a society ... one of them is, Are around the lab and I all have interests in this and
there different people there? Now I'm talking abouthave sort of simultaneously agreed that, in fact, the
improvising as a single person, mostly. But the ex- problem of making a good piece of music is a prob-
perience is not very different in some ways. I knowlem of finding a structure that satisfies a lot of
that if I am working on a theme I say to myself, different constraints. And, these constraints are
"It's time for the middle voice to do something grouped into families which really require the mu-
with this" and then you know one only has two sic to be represented in different ways. The typical
hands and what happens is that it is as though I jazz improvisation situation is pretty clear: there is
started another servant, or another .. ., its almost a basic harmonic pattern that you have actually
like being a conductor. In fact, I record a lot of agreed on a little more than other aspects of music.
these improvisations and I have noticed that someYou have a thematic thing, you know what the
of the best ones are ones that I didn't know that I tune is. The rhythmic treatment we change from
did, in a real sense. But as I go over the tape and I one time to another, but in any particular situation
find that while I was doing one of these pieces-I you have a rhythmic representation of the thing
remember one distinctly-I was thinking about that is pretty well off by itself. And then, of course,
Tchaikovsky's piano concerto and saying, "I wish there are timbral and phrasing representations too. I
I knew how to do those arpeggios," which had know some composers who start their piece by
nothing to do whatever with this piece, but I was drawing big curved lines showing what the plan for
doing the piece and saying, "Well it's time to de- excitement is; the Schank script of that aspect. So
velop the middle voice a little bit," like engaging a you might start out having several different inten-
part of your mind and just giving it a job. "You've tions, and my view of how you satisfy this is if
got to make a variation of this theme using your you're good at these things you don't do it in an
thumbs," you tell it, because that might be the wayintegrated centralized way but you set off these dif-
you do the middle voice if you're doing a nice clean ferent parts of your personalities that are experts on
three-part piece with the voices spread apart. The imposing this representation or this kind of super-
only conscious experience is that. .. well I wantedframe on the situation. I gave a demonstration once
to come in on the second measure, I want it to be a of some of these three-part fugues that I was work-
sort of stretto thing that overlaps nicely and also ing on and in the middle of giving this talk I
it's time for the theme to be inverted so I tell that suddenly realized that at least half of the pieces
little person in my head that he's got to try to fit in that I had shown the students had the same pattern
a variation of the theme that comes in a little bit of entrances. Very different musical ideas and yet
late and it's upside down. Then what happens is the overall timing and plan of the piece was usually
not a perfect inversion, but a good fugue theme one voice, a second one, a third one in where the
does have a couple of nice characteristic intervals others start to fall apart; but the relative positions
and those get inverted fine. The rest is not perfect and tempos of these three things..,. the third one

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was usually augmented by a factor of two, for ex- goes back to the reason that I got involved in the
ample. Now, I had always thought that was just society idea at all. In the early period of artificial
laziness because if you have a temporally aug- intelligence we wrote more or less conventional re-
mented fugue theme twice as slow at some point cursive search programs. Then, gradually I guess, in
later in the thing from an improvising point of the sixties, and Bobrow's program is an example of
view, that's a chance to take a breath and think that.
about what's going to come, because time stretches Roads: Pre-ATN [augmented transition network]?
out and you can focus your full attention on the Minsky: Right, it was pre-ATN. In fact, ATN came
other voices and the ornaments. But while I was ex- from efforts to straighten out chaotic programs like
plaining this for the first time to someone else I Bobrow's. Bobrow had the idea of demons and used
realized that really this global pattern was rather a language which was in the Snobol class or Pro-
canned. That if I wanted to do a piece and I wantedduction System class, it's called today. So instead of
to think about injecting a new harmony I tell the writing a program as a script of what to do, you
parts of my mind things like, "I just want the har- wrote a program in an opportunistic fashion of pairs
mony to creep diatonically," a typical sequence, andof conditions and actions so the linguistics in
that's the kind of thing I'm conscious of. So the un-
Bobrow's program was saying, "If this happens do
conscious has taken up this huge script of how to that." This eventually got formalized more thor-
make a voice with several entrances and it just oughly in the languages of Hewitt and so forth. But
knows what to do and I don't have to bother with it went way back to the Comit language of Victor
it. Yngve in the middle fifties. So Yngve, I think, was
the first to invent the production language. Bobrow
called his language Meteor to suggest that it was
Constraints, Production Systems, and Actors better than Comit but indebted to it. And then
Hewitt's language, Planner, was a recursively im-
Roads: First of all, you talked about how your plemented form of that. Indeed, Hewitt's program-
thumbs, which were playing the part of the middle ming primitives probably were the precursors of my
voice in this society, were looking at what the other frames because he would not only give the con-
voices were doing, or what the other fingers, were dition and action but would also have a list of
doing. It seemed to me that what actually happens advice attached to each such statement about
in that kind of a situation is that the thumbs are which resources to use. The program would say, "If
not, in fact, looking at what the others are doing such and such happens, try to prove a theorem of
but the others are telling them what they are doing. this sort and use the following ten theorems if you
They are being impacted. They can't move indepen- can in the course of proving it." So, I think Hewitt's
dently of the other fingers. Isn't a supremely program was sort of the first advice-taker within
important notion in this idea of a society of com- the direct productionlike formulas. Well, then what
municating experts the kinds of communication happened, of course, as people in artificial intel-
that occur between these experts? In that case you ligence know, was the history of what happened
would assume that one thing was looking at the with Winograd's great program, which was the first
other and, in fact, the others were telling it what to combine syntax and semantics of language in the
to do. same big program. In fact, Winograd had some syn-
Minsky: Or at least constraining it among some tactic theories, but instead of parsing the sentence
choices it might have. completely before it tried to figure out what it
Roads: Is constraining it the same as telling it what meant it would make some of its syntactic deci-
to do? What is the difference between communica- sions by going and looking at the words and seeing
tion and constraint in that case? what kind of things those words could mean. It
Minsky: Well, that's a good question because it would take too long to give examples. But the thing

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got rather messy and, in fact, when Winograd
finished that piece of work he decided the most
important thing to do was not to improve his
SHRDLU program, because he was losing track of
it, but to work on a theory of how programs should
be organized. So he went up a level and I think he is
still at this higher level. I understand he has a book
coming out shortly.
Roads: And what about Winograd and Bobrow's
KRL [knowledge representation language]?
Minsky: Well, KRL was along this line but the
Winograd book, I think, is more philosophical and
considers KRL as a possible approach to the higher-
level thing. What I started to do was to look just at
Winograd's blocks world where the program was
acting like a child trying to build with blocks and it
occurred to me that this program could be broken
up into little programs that communicate ... but
when I looked at it closely it turned out that the
communication could be of a lower level than peo-
ple had thought rather than a higher. Essentially, in
retrospect, what I was doing was questioning the
need for global variables. In a nutshell, for example,
suppose you want to pick something up, and so
first you have to look for it, and I see that there is
the cup on the table. In the traditional approach
one would say, "Well, there is a cup at coordinates
X, Y, Z." So, I would send my coordinates X, Y, Z
over to the hand-moving program and it might
change that and would then move the hand to X, Y,
Z. It occurred to me that there is an easier way.
Maybe there is a central place called the focus of
attention, or several central places that are able to
keep track of what is the subject of attention. And
so, I don't have to tell the hand, "X, Y, Z." I can say,
"I am attending to a certain object," and I just tell
the hand program to pick it up, where "it" is a
meaningless variable. Then the hand program says,
"Well, what is the focus of attention right now and
what are its spatial locations?" so that instead of
transmitting the variables to the hand in a calling
sequence or explicitly, I am suggesting that there
are sort of fixed places for certain kinds of variables
and all the programs that need to know those know
internally where to find them. So, then I took an
extreme view and said, "Can I make a semi-
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intelligent programming system to do what
Winograd's program did without passing any varia-
bles at all." Of course not. But it turned out that
most of them were unnecessary and the program di-
vided into little agencies, each of which had only to
activate others and say, "Do your usual job," and
very few messages got passed. It's a little more ex-
treme in that direction than Hewitt's well-known
Actor system, which does send information around
with the messages. I was moving in the direction of
a programming language that sent as few as possi-
ble, and in general, the things that it sends don't
have any meaning. Then I reinterpreted and said to
myself, "Well, of course, if different parts of the
brain are going to communicate with each other it
would be really very difficult if they were to use a
language because then each of these parts of the
brain would have had to learn the language and its
grammar and its semantics and lexicon separately
and that might be very hard to do." So I started
moving in the direction of seeing how far you could
get with very little language at all. That fits with
the musical improvising experience. If you really
had to think of all the things, all the multiple con-
straints that were satisfied in a piece, you could
never do it. But if you can just activate a lot of ex-
perts that don't have to communicate very much
but just send constraints among one another say-
ing, "Whatever you do don't put the..."
Roads: One of the programs described in this issue
is a system that is based on, basically, a Markov
chain kind of idea, where you have probabilistic
means that are used to determine the probability of
the next note and the probability of the next key.
One of the problems I think Fry is running into is it
works alright for music which doesn't have severe
idiomatic constraints, but there are some kinds of
music in which there seems to be a formula. For
instance, his jazz that modulates sounds rather con-
vincing, but in his twelve-bar blues you seem to be
listening to it on a very different level. You already
know what the harmonic formula is going to be
and you are listening to the solo line where there
are riffs that inform that kind of musical behavior
to a great degree seems like some kind of formula,
maybe a grammatical model in which there is some
Roads 31
 kind of phrase stored up, would be a next step to The Semantics of Music
represent that kind of thing. So how does the
Markov model fit in with the sort of opposite
where you have this overall script for the wholeRoads: You were involved in semantic information
thing? processing, and you continue to be involved in that
Minsky: Well, it's very hard unless you realize that notion. I think most people have an idea what the
you are trying to do all those things at once. I think syntax is-the structure of events on a time line-
it is unlikely that they will all emerge at once. I but what is the semantics of music, in your view?
mentioned that some composers draw this plan of Minsky: That's a terribly hard question because it
the whole piece. I meant that all do, in some sense. could mean so many things. In language for many
I don't think that any composer really just writes years I think we have had a false sense of security
and writes without any idea of what's coming far that there was something called syntax which was
ahead of the notes he is doing and very often ... the pure structure of language that didn't have any-
some people fill in events in what the AI people thing much to do with meaning and then there is
would call a top-down fashion. something else called meaning, which is a separate
Roads: Well, there's a large-scale conflict and reso- thing. In fact, I believe the separation is rather ar-
lution that's very much carried over in music tificial. But the belief that it exists has been very
theory; certainly in the Schenkerian kind of ap- useful. That is, the contributions of Chomsky to
proach where there can be conflict with the original making mathematical theories of the kinds of
key that you are starting off with, the tonic. structures that would be useful representing what
Minsky: Right! Now he's not recursive enough. goes on at one level in language was a great thing
Presumably this idea of conflict and resolution oc- and inspired by the idea that maybe this was a sort
curs at many different levels and it may occur in a of closed structure that had some validity itself. I
rhythmic system in a different time than in a har- don't know if Chomsky himself continues to feel
monic system. Or, within each measure there are that strongly about it, but lots of his students think
structures like that. Now, when one of the stochas- that there really is a clear division between purely
tic programs modulates ... presumably when a linguistic structures and other kinds of cognitive
composer does it he has several purposes. I notice activities and structures. Now, Winograd started to
in Schubert sometimes one of the characteristics of break that down and earlier Bobrow and Rafael did.
Schubert is modulating without a big fuss. You justI'm not saying they're the only ones, but I know
take this note C and it becomes the third of an A people from our laboratory better than other places
flat chord and then it hangs around in one of theseand these early programs were able to deal with
flat keys for awhile and suddenly snaps back. One language to some extent in ambiguous situations
of the features of Schubert's music is that it is pop-
and find what structures they "really meant" by
ular music for many people who aren't deeply into mixing information about what the language was
classical music. So, he has some sense of what thefor as well as information about how it was at-
average person can stand in a modulation. In tached. So, for example, Bobrow's program could
Brahms or somebody you'll modulate for a long occasionally deal with rather complex English sen-
time and I myself lose my sense of that. So, if youtences because it knew, in the simplest sense of
change from C to A flat for five minutes and you know, that most of the sentences in a high school
come back well, Johannes Brahms might think thatalgebra word problem book designate or mean lin-
he is relieving this tension that's been there all theear equations. And so, Bobrow's program could go
time, but I have just absolutely forgotten and it's through a sentence and it would look for words like
just another modulation. I have a little sense thattimes and the sum of this and that and sort of de-
the theme is back where it started but not nearly as tach those from the rest of the structure and say,
much as, I presume, Brahms thinks I am supposed "Ah, this sentence is saying that sum of these two
to. things is equal to that thing," and then it is able to

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get the correct linguistic structure for the sentence Minsky: Well, I think that's absolutely true too. So,
just by the assumption that the phrases in between it's not that it's this or that, but that those ele-
those arithmetic connectives were going to be noun ments are there. I remember when I was a child I
phrases or possibly more complicated phrases that was irritated by orchestral music not because I
designate variables whose values have to be found didn't understand it but that I felt somehow ex-
or be specified. ploited by it. There's a Schumann symphony that
Roads: That begs the question as to whether or not has wonderful trumpets in the fourth movement
the analogous notion of a linear equation exists in and I thought that was beautiful but chills would
music. run up and down my spine and I considered it to be
Minsky: Right! I think it does except that because undignified to respond to a particular timbre in this
we have no ways to talk about these they're not particular way. So, that certainly has a meaning. I
talked about and most of us don't develop sharp don't know what the meaning is. It has associations
theories of what kinds of things are happening in with martial prowess and all sorts of things just
music. Certainly, when I do one of these themes like a bugle call. Indeed, for all we know some of
and variations I have a rather non-verbal but still these responses are innate. Although I am skeptical
clear idea of what this piece is about. This will sayof any particular theory I have been impressed, for
that if I have a theme like the Art of Fugue that example, by a book by a physiologist named Man-
starts with an ascending fifth and then goes down fred Clynes, who claims to have evidence for innate
tracing out a minor chord and then a diminished responses ... emotional responses of six or seven
seventh chord, that that's an interesting structure. varieties for certain kinds of phrasing, certain kinds
Not as a mathematician but just as a form, sort of of envelopes. They may be pitch envelopes or am-
familiar form. Then a later variation will say, "Nowplitude envelopes or even tempo envelopes.
let's explore what happens if we leave the third out Roads: Of course, we have to qualify this by saying
of that," ... we go up a fifth and we are going to gothat it depends to a great degree on one's mental
somewhere else. Now, I expect the listener to know set, so to speak. There is that book by Slonimsky,
that this is a D minor chord rather than a major Lexicon of Musical Invective, which has a list of
chord. You see, if the third is left out then you can't
composers and their works and all the bad things
tell whether it's minor or major, but he knows thatthat were said about all of them and how they were
this fifth now means a minor chord. It doesn't all misinterpreted at a given point in time. You
mean anything like what a word means, if I say, have to have a certain disposition, clearly.
"table" we know it's a table, but minor chord Minsky: In fact, if there is one question I have
means something within the web of belief about about Clynes's theory and his evidence is that it's
such things. The subtle thing that we find so hard too good. He claims he has tried these particular
to express is that meaning isn't absolute. stimuli in people in many different cultures and
Roads: There is not a linear relationship between backgrounds and gets very similar responses. Most
the sign and the signified. of my experience on communication is that peo-
Minsky: Right! Even if there seems to be ... even if ple's emotional communication to things are quite
you think that table means table, when you inspect different from one culture to another. Nevertheless,
it closely, what table means is a network of rela- I think what there may be in what he has dis-
tions between tablelike things and even some covered is perhaps there is some innate emotional
nontablelike things. response to certain kinds of sounds. It seems to me
Roads: This gets into another musical issue, whichthat a child should be able to tell when its mother
is that in the romantic conception music is emo- is angry or affectionate because otherwise it is not
tions. This seems to work fine for Chopin, but not going to be able to learn the kinds of things it has
so well in a Bach Ricercare. But for some, the se- to do to get control of things in the world. So,
mantics of music is that certain phrases denote something like that must be true, and so when we
certain emotional states. talk about musical semantics there may be some

Roads 33

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places where it is exploiting built-in recognizers of you are not trying to remember the exact theme
certain kinds of events. but how to construct a similar theme.
Minsky: Right! You want to get into the state for
doing the process. The theme itself is the surface
K Lines and Musical Memory result of some process and what's really important
to remember is the process. With the K-line idea
Roads: In our discussion of music and improvisa- you don't even remember the process itself, in
tion, we haven't really yet touched upon the role of some sense, you just remember the recipe or the in-
memory. One would assume that there are differentgredients of your little mental . .. which parts of
levels of memory or that memory is distributed your mind and in what state they were when that
somehow in this theory of communicating experts. process happened.
Your theory of K-lines appears to be related to that. Roads: Yes.
Minsky: Yes, right. In fact, this K-lines theory is in Minsky: Now, I think this theory may be too ex-
a paper that should come out in a couple of months treme and I'll have to modify it so that it has more
in a journal called Cognitive Science. It's a sort of temporal structure. The thing described in my pa-
bridge between the frame idea and this neurological per just turns on agents and hopes they do the right
idea of trying to have very few variables. A K-line isthing. And, that's probably incredibly naive.
an imaginary neuron that goes to a lot of other
brain centers. When you have an experience that is
memorable, for one reason or another, some part of The Al and Music Group
your mind which wants to remember it just sort of
punches this huge card which doesn't say what the Roads: Now, I understand that you prepared a grant
memory is; it says which brain centers, tiny brain proposal which will involve a coordinated effort to
centers (or which agents in the society of mind) apply the methods of Al and some of the knowledge
were active at that moment. The idea is that in- that AI has been unable to uncover about intelli-
stead of remembering the thing as a symbolic gence to music. This is called "Computational As-
representation, if you, for example, solved a prob- pects of Human Musical Activity." I wonder if you
lem by a certain method and you get a new could outline what it might entail.
problem, then you don't really want an English par- Minsky: Well, I'm a little apprehensive about this
agraph saying what the method is. You would just proposal because it is a new area. In the past the
like to turn on a subset of parts of your brain that best things that have come out of our work were
were active when you solved the old problem and ones that weren't proposed. I mean, nobody pro-
then they are all aroused and ready and if you're posed that Greenblatt write a chess program and I
lucky, if whatever made you think that this was thedon't think that anybody proposed that Winograd
right memory to evoke, then you have just the right write his language program. It was just supported;
helpers around to solve the new problem. Presum- everything is opportunistic and if somebody has a
ably, when you are making variations on a theme good idea they do it. Now, my idea here was that
you don't want to remember the theme, you want we have an opportunity. Over many years I've
to remember the agents that were active just beforewanted to do some serious cognitive studies of mu-
you thought of the theme in the first place. Or you sical composition. This is more composition than
want the agents that are active when you've just analysis.
heard it, that represent their reaction to it and thenRoads: Yes.
the way you get a variation is by having a similar Minsky: But things never were right. For example,
generator or at least by having things looking for I've been in a position to have composers come to
something that produces a similar effect. M.I.T. and work on such things from time to time.
Roads: That seems to get into the notion of declara- Roads: Who are some of those composers?
tive versus procedural knowledge, in the sense that Minsky: Alan Forte was my first experiment in that

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and we got along wonderfully. What I didn't know
was that Alan was just turning from composition to
scholarship and analysis. And also, he got so inter-
ested in software and programming that he spent
most of the year writing a book on Snobol, which
won a prize as a matter of fact. It was a great book!
But, the musical project never emerged from that.
There was also a young composer named Jay Jar-
oslov, a couple of years ago. When he came he was
working on beautiful scores. One day I went in to
see how he was doing and he had gotten some over-
size score paper with, I think 64 lines covering a
whole desk, and he was putting notes in. That
looked great and I asked him how could he tell
what anything that big sounds like. He said, "Well,
I'm actually not worrying about what it sounds
like." And, after a time it turned out that Jay had
gone from music into graphics and is quite success-
ful in graphics these days. So that project didn't
work. The only project that really worked was a
young fellow named Wayne Slawsen who is now
head of music at Pittsburgh and Wayne was in-
terested in both linguistics and music and he
developed a language for composition on the
PDP-10 and debugged it and got all the hardware
working and wrote some very nice pieces. But he
had so much to do that even he didn't interact very
much with any of the youngsters around the lab.
One of the problems with music projects in com-
puter laboratories is that the people who most want
to do it are youngsters who are entranced with mu-
sic but aren't composers and that that enthusiasm
isn't good enough. It's too hard for an amateur to
really understand these processes, I think. Even-
tually, maybe. But now we have an unusual
opportunity because there are three or four young-
sters who really do seem to understand language
and music and things like that very well at the
same time and artificial intelligence theories.
Roads: David Levitt is going to be modeling jazz
improvisation.
Minsky: That's right, and he has a rather sophisti-
cated idea of many kinds of constraints, all the
kinds we have discussed, and is trying to work out
a programming system that allows you to do all
these things at once and defer choices when they
are not urgent so as to get as many of the con-
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straints satisfied as is feasible. There are two
aspects there. There is the technical problem of
making such a computational system and there is
the ... I guess I have to call it the semantic prob-
lem of what are the kinds of constraints that are
natural and important for different kinds of com-
posers and listeners. He's going to be focusing on
both of those questions.
Roads: This work is going to be based on the LISP
machines at M.I.T., here.
Minsky: Well, I think it needs a very big computer.
We will probably use LISP machines if we have
enough of them and we want to have some real-
time facility. Another thing I want to say about this
kind of research. Because I'm not very optimistic
about serious scientific research agencies support-
ing it. I think most people would think that in this
day of underprivileged countries needing help that
music doesn't have a very high priority. One thing
to say is that the world is always going to be that
way until AI succeeds, but we'll let that pass. The
other thing is that everyone does agree that the sci-
entific study of language has been an enormous
shot in the arm for psychology and the combina-
tion of linguistic theories and psychological
theories over the last twenty years had led to very
substantial progress in understanding the mind and
its disorders and, maybe more important, its nor-
mal function. Now, there is a reason for studying
music which, I think, elevates it above the enter-
tainment category, and that is that in all other
sciences, or at least all other biological sciences,
the comparative study has been the breakthrough.
One couldn't understand the kidney of one animal
because it has a lot of ad hoc features in its geome-
try and even in its chemistry is going to have lots of
strange details that you will never understand. But,
if you look at twenty kidneys from the lowest ani-
mals, the birds, and reptiles and mammals, you find
that with all those differences you can see what is
common to them, and, the same with anatomy and
all of physiology. Now, in language, with all due re-
spect to the chimpanzees and the gorillas, we don't
have anything like language in other animals to
study. We can study language between Englishmen
and Frenchmen and I believe that has been tremen-
dously productive within the theory alright. But,
Roads 35
the grim fact is that languages ... human lan- pieces of music and constructing some kind of a
guages, are pretty much the same. So now let's ask, representation for them.
Is there another activity where you have temporal Minsky: And presumably, I hope they will end up
patterns that satisfy overlapping constraints in a with somewhat similar...
symbolic way? Roads: Intermediate...
Roads: Yes. Minsky: Intermediate languages, right! Well, now
Minsky: And that's music. So, it's our only chance one problem, which I can't help, is that Levitt un-
to make comparative studies of linguistic cog- derstands jazz idioms very well and wants to make
nition. his program improvise those, and Amuedo is more
Roads: John Amuedo is going to be exploring ways at home in Baroque and Romantic periods. But
of automatically producing concise descriptions of maybe that is good and maybe it is bad. We'll see.
composition. That seems to involve some kind of I'm certainly more at home in the Baroque cen-
analysis or modeling of the listening process. turies. But Levitt has convinced me that the
Minsky: Yes, he would like to try to work out new structural issues are bound to be very similar.
methods of analyzing that do use these more com- Roads: Another person in this project is William
plicated overlapping structures that I wish I could Kornfeld, who will be working on an interactive
say that AI understands now, but the people in ar- music editor on the Lisp Machines. It will be a
tificial intelligence are just beginning to work withgraphics display of a sheet of music in standard mu
the problem of having multiple descriptions. For sical notation. He is also going to be working on an
example, in Sussman's work on electronics, which organ keyboard input and sound synthesizer.
Minsky: Well, we would like to have a complete
is quite a different field, when you look at a resistor
in an electronic circuit, for example one of the re- composer assistance laboratory here and Kornfeld
sistors in a voltage divider, you can think of it in has already constructed some programs that do ver
several ways. You can think of it as it contributes ainteresting graphics.
voltage to the output, you can think of it as biasing
a transistor so that it won't saturate, and you can
Musical Capabilities of Machines
think of it in terms of the DC levels, that's the bias
sort of thing, of maintaining parts of the circuits,
and you can think of the same voltage on it in Roads: It seems that computers already surpass hu-
terms of the changing component, which is in- mans' capabilities in certain constrained ways. Do
volved in processing a signal, etcetera. And, over you see the same kind of thing happening in music
the last four or five years Sussman has worked outWill a machine be able to surpass, or do you believe
programs that can look at a simple electronic cir- it is possible for a machine to surpass, human com-
cuit and its beginning to be able to say the kinds ofposing capabilities?
things that a circuit analyst would say about. Tradi-Minsky: Surely it is in this sense: although lots of
tionally, you would just have a bunch of equations people wish they could, nobody has ever produced
about nodes and sums of current and sums of volt- even a shred of a convincing argument that compu
ages around loops and things like that. But, ters had any particular limit in comparison with
Sussman's program can talk in terms of the small what people can do about any particular thing. It is
signal gain of the amplifier when it looks at this more the limit is knowing how a program could be
resistor and say how its value and its DC compo- made to learn what a five-year-old can do that
nent affects things like that. seems difficult.
Roads: Learning!
Roads: Just to contrast a little bit what David Levitt
and John Amuedo are doing: it seems like David is Minsky: Right. Learning the simple things that ev-
going to be generating new musical compositionseryone can do is the hard thing. I would not be the
which can be seen as similar to extant composi- least bit surprised to see a computer discovering
tions whereas John is going to be taking existing new theories of relativity and writing Shakespeare

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plays, provided that I had seen it doing the kinds of pecially since he had only been champion for a
things that a ten-year-old can do. I don't expect to week. Hans felt quite bad about the thing. He felt
see that for a long time, but it seems to me the gap especially bad because, as you know, backgammon
between the child and the adult and the genius of involves dice and machine had gotten some rather
the century is small compared to the gap between unusually good throws. It wouldn't have won if it
the infant and a child. And as Arthur Clarke has hadn't been lucky to boot. I think it is maybe even
often put it, "Anything just a little past our tech- more depressing to be beaten by a lucky machine
nology often seems like complete magic." We have than a smart one. I suppose that has happened to
no reason to think that there is any great difficultyJohn Cage from time to time. He swore to me that
between ordinary and unusual intelligence. Maybe he never edits the draw of his cards and I take his
there will be, but our understanding of intelligenceword for it. Let me just add that the player piano
right now is so feeble that people who think that certainly didn't intimidate the pianists on the
they can use technical constructions like G6del's whole. But, then it wasn't as good as them in most
theorem or complexity theory to make such argu- respects.
ments are just whistling in the dark, so to speak.

The Role of Music

Technology and the Arts in Society
Roads: We know that technology has a very func-
Roads: The concept of artificial intelligence and tional, obvious meaning for us in society. It is a
music might have negative connotations to some tool. What is the role of music in society do you
people. What do you see as the role of technology inthink?
Minsky: That's a very marvelous question because
the future and its relationship to the arts, and more
generally, to society and culture? we're used to music, you and I, and we listen to it a
Minsky: Well, predicting the effect on people of a little bit from time to time. I bet that I spend less
technological advance is hard because one doesn'tthan an hour a day listening to music and I don't
really know what these things mean in the whole know how much you do. There are all these people
cultural web when the fact that Shakespeare wrote interested in music out there who listen to it six
these great plays didn't stop other people from writ-
and ten hours a day. There are people who can't do
ing. Generally, if somebody does something very their homework without the radio on. I find that
well this doesn't stop other people from doing the you can't eat in a restaurant in Cambridge without
same sorts of things. Certainly, in sports there areasking the manager to turn the thing down a bit
millions, far too many millions, I think, of people and he usually won't. It pursues us. Apparently it
who still play baseball even though they are not as fills some very important function. And, it plays an
good as the professionals. On the other hand, in important economic role, I suppose. Although the
pure mathematics it is a little bit different. When composers
I get precious little of the product. Now, I
was working with my teacher, Gleason, at Harvard have asked myself, "What on earth could this thing
there were moments when I felt, "What's the pointbe for-why are so many people doing this?" I have
in doing mathematics, because here is this mind asked a lot of composers. Many of them don't think
that can do it so much better." Well, after awhile Ithat is an interesting question. That's reasonable. If
found that there were some things that I could do the thing is that interesting you don't want to be
that either he couldn't or wasn't interested in doing
bothered with someone asking you because you
or would never get around to. Now, recently in theknow you could never even get to the surface of
June issue of the Scientific American there is this what concerns you, but I've made up several little
article by Hans Berliner about his backgammon theories and other people must have the same
program which beat the world champion the other kinds of theories. One is a cynical theory and that
week. There is something pathetic about that. Es-is that music is indeed very much like language but

Roads 37

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contrary to what I was saying before, it doesn't
mean anything and so it gives you the feeling of
thinking, it uses up parts of your brain that nor-
mally are understanding stuff, but don't have the
unpleasant consequences of understanding things
and so music is relaxing in the sense that it exer-
cises the part of the brain that has a drive to think
by thinking about things that are meaningless, at
least in the sense of not connecting with the other
meanings that we are concerned with in real life. It
is meaningful in its own network. So there it is a
drug which is just sedating a part of the mind. The
cynicism is saying that thinking is actually un-
pleasant and so people like this thing going on that
relieves it. Then my friend, Ed Fredkin, had another
theory of music which was quite totally different
and unexpected. He said, "Have you ever watched a
mouse when you put it in a new environment, it
runs here, it runs back. It only goes a little bit out
of its nest. Then it goes this way and comes back
along the first path and goes a little further and it
seems to incrementally build up this map of a little
environment." Well, suggests Fredkin, there is a
thing in the brain that has this purpose. It is for
making maps of the environment and it might be
concrete like just paths in the woods or abstract
like paths from one idea to another, we don't know.
If you look at a piece of music it is very like that,
isn't it? Music repeats and yet it doesn't repeat ...
it does a phrase and then it does it again and then it
does a little turn, then it does the two of them.
That ABA thing is where you explore something
and then you do something else and then you come
back to the first. And so, he said, "Music reminds
me of a very timid person, or a timid mouse, under-
standing a new place. It just happens to be a place
the composer knows and he is telling you about."
So, that's a funny little theory. Then, of course,
people do different things with music. When I was
a little child, I think, one of the things I thought
was fun was listening to the bass or an inner voice.
That was just a piece of luck. I think most of the
people that we think are nonmusical, who are
called nonmusical, are people who thought it was
just like speech and it's just the thing at the top,
which is the tune, that is important. And they
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didn't let other parts of their mind play with the
other things.
Roads: Well, it's true that human beings need mu-
sic. But will machines need music?
Minsky: The kinds of thoughts I have been having
about artificial intelligence really are funny in that
context because you know that for a hundred years
since Boole and Frege and Russell and so forth, and
even Lewis Carroll tried to make theories of com-
mon sense in terms of logic, people have thought
that intellect is different from these other things
but really the secret of intellect is finding the ax-
ioms of perfect rational deduction. Now, it seems to
me that there is a lesson in what happened to them.
Frege's work was destroyed by Russell. Hilbert's
work on formalizing mathematics was destroyed by
G6del's, and that sort of thing kept happening.
Nobody has been able to find a single logical con-
sistent theory that seems to be very good at
explaining commonsense thinking. Now, my col-
league, John McCarthy, thinks that ... well, these
were beginners and there is no reason to expect the
problem will be solved in a mere hundred years; it
might take four hundred. Just as it has been three
hundred years since Kepler. So there is no reason to
think that the thing will fail just because it is tak-
ing awhile. But my feeling is, my intuition is, that
consistency isn't very good. That what G6del's
theorem really shows is that within a consistent
logic there are constraints which make it very hard
to express things. In particular, it is very hard to
express things about the system. Gidel shows
that, in fact, it is hopeless. To express all true
things about the system, anyway. I think the reason
the mind is so good at dealing with commonsense
logic is that it works on several levels. One part of
it watches the other. One part near the surface does
things like logic and deduction and another part
criticizes it and says, "Well, that's a bad way to
think, that's getting near a paradox-I once thought
something like that and it didn't help." I think ar-
tificial intelligence, in my opinion, is going to need
a multilevel system which does this kind of coun-
terpoint, which has simple processes trying to do
simple things and other simple processes which
aren't working on the problem but are working on
controlling the behavior of these. And yet other
ones in the subconscious, which don't even know
that the top-level one is working on mathematics,
but they know that when this top-level one starts
to act in such and such a way it is not going to get
anywhere, and apply pressure to him. So, I think
that the human mind needs this kind of multilevel
activity in order to get anything done. Particularly,
to get anything new done. And maybe the ma-
chines will too. So maybe someday it will turn out
that at least for some AI programs that the way for
them to get better is to sort of play scenarios to
them of problems that aren't actually meaningful at
all but force them to pay attention to certain kinds
of control structures. At least, for me the work I'm
doing on theories of memory is very much like
composing a piece. There are too many constraints,
I just don't know a way to make a system that does
all these things but in ... through the experience
with counterpoint I have really learned a lot about
how to do three different things with my mind
without them clobbering each other completely
and then every now and then they fit together and
then there is something I can write a paper about.
The rest of the time I just loaf around enjoying the
thoughts running around. It's not so different from
music.
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Roads: I was thinking about what Harold Cohen
was saying about the insistent meaningfulness of
things and how certainly it would seem to contra-
dict the cynical view of music; that music alone
doesn't mean anything. Because it would seem that
in Harold Cohen's view nothing means anything;
meaning is something we simply construct out of
whatever we're given.
Minsky: Meaning is inventing a structure that you
put on there...
Roads: Exactly.
Minsky: I think maybe any kind of music is learn-
ing how to fit a rhythmic structure and a harmonic
structure and indeed a lyrical semantic structure
because Bernie Greenberg, a nearby programmer,
tells me that many of the phrases in the Bach Cho-
rales have particular biblical significances. He
studied these things and he studied Alfred Ein-
stein's work. So in addition to the massive
constraints that Bach satisfies for me, I didn't even
dream that on top of the ability to weave six voices
and five rhythms and four schemes that there is a
religious and literal verbal structure on top of that.
So the rest of music is like that except maybe not
quite so much. That's what meaning is, learning to
handle multiple views at the same time.
Roads 39