This follows on from the making music on a PC thread, some things I've been thinking about as I experimented with various software.

The computer is a tool, like any other, man has been using tools to make music since he first hit a hollow rock with a stick or blew into a sea shell but at what point does it stop being the tool and become the musician? At what point does music become a science not an art? At what stage are you just painting by numbers?

Seems to me with the software available I could just take a musical score and type it into the computer, tell it what instruments to use, press enter, sit back and listen but is that music? Can sounds with no soul be called music? Distilled water is tasteless, it's the imperfections in music which give it the flavour but imperfections can be programmed in. You can program a computer with the rules of harmony and random selection and it will compose music but can music created by a machine ever be described as beautiful?