A CONVERSATION WITH MARVIN MINSKY

The following excerpts are from an interview with Marvin Minsky which took place at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 23rd, 1991. The interview, which is included in its entirety as a Foreword in the book Understanding Music with AI: Perspectives on Music Cognition (edited by Mira Balaban, Kemal Ebcioglu, and Otto Laske), is a conversation about music, its peculiar features as a human activity, the special problems it poses for the scientist, and the suitability of AI methods for clarifying and/or solving some of these problems. The conversation is open-ended, and should be read accordingly, as a discourse to be continued at another time. OL: I wish we could read people's brains when they are engaged in music-making. Since that is, alas, beyond the state of the art of AI, we are forced to deal with such epistemological issues as how to represent knowledge on the basis of what people tell us they do, which in most cases isn't very close to what they are actually doing.