Turing test: Software that produces original music in the style of great composers can fool experts.

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David Cope's Emmy program produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, many so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created.

Now, his successor product, “Emily Howell,” aims to create modern music.

Douglas Hofstadter worries in Cope's book, Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, “things that touch me at my deepest core — pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages — might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.”

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