Eine Kleine Naughtmusik: How Nefarious Nonartists Cleverly Imitate Music

Dave Soldier

Because there is only so much that can bebrought forth from a single human composer before a certainsameness sets in, dissatisfied musicians have always sought col-laborators. Mozart stole melodies from his pet starling, payingthe bird’s commission in seed. Who, Mozart or the bird, wasthe great Viennese composer? Or, which one was responsiblefor creating the genuine music?

NAUGHTMUSIK, THE STRONG DEFINITIONOnce it was easy to define genuine music. Music was whatMuses made, and lyrics were what lyre players made. These ide-alists led a pastoral, anonymous existence, occupying them-selves with the invention of polyphony, new tuning systems andperformances during evening raids along the Aegean coast.

Portents of trouble appeared with the polyphonic gothrocker Palestrina, the first known composer (der. Latin com-munist � Fr. poseur). Music became stuff that was composed. Tounderstand these phenomena, one must deconstruct, or moreproperly, decompose this semantic.

Let us assume that genuine music is Art. As such it excludesthe set of nonart sounds, or naughtmusik. The strong definitionof genuine music includes sounds created by “Artists with In-tent.” That is, composers who know what they’re doing. The set{genuine music} includes all works by all great composers. Evi-dently, genuine music stems from the heroic will and effort ofArtists who know what they’re doing.

To define the members of {genuine music}, we suggest astrong detection protocol in order to protect genuine musicfrom nichtmusik infestation. Thus, we must determine if thesounds in question are or are not the work of a true creativeArtist. But how can we judge from the work itself whether itwas manufactured by a Creative Artist?

A test designed to address an analogous problem was sug-gested by the mathematician Alan Turing. The Classical Tur-ing Test was a gedankenexperiment proposed to determineif a computer could be considered to possess intelligence. Inthis protocol, TelePrompTers were placed in three separaterooms by the researchers. One room housed a human inter-rogator, another a human who answered the questions andin the third room a computer that also answered questions.The questions were typed by the interrogator, who receivedthe answers entered by the others. If the human interrogatorcould not distinguish the unseen computer from another

human, the computer passed thetest and earned the adjective “in-telligent” [1].

To conduct an Adapted TuringTest, one could play recordings ofgenuine music and naughtmusikwithout giving any clue to thehuman auditors regarding which iswhich. If the human judges detectthe fakery, the strong definition ofgenuine music can be confidentlyadopted. For results from experi-mental trials, read on.

COWBIRDS, MOCKINGBIRDSAND THIEVING HUMAN CHILDRENBut first, the cowbird. The female American brown-headedcowbird, Molothrus ater, refuses to build a nest, hatch her owneggs or care for her own children. Rather, she deposits as manyas 40 eggs per year into nests that belong to other songbirdspecies. She finds the nests either in trees by watching froman aerial observation post or on the ground by flapping herwings and crashing through the forest floor to flush out othermothers. She quickly lays her eggs in their temporarily aban-doned nests, and the returning mother raises the cowbirdfledglings with her own brood.

So nonhuman adult animals clearly have the capacity to in-tentionally fool others. But can they fool others by imitatinggenuine music?

An affirmative conclusion can be drawn from the exampleof the male Northern Mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos. Thesebirds are widespread throughout the United States and loveto sing from February through August, take a break betweensets in early September and resume singing from late Sep-tember through early November. An individual male mock-ingbird (Fig. 1) imitates as many as 200 songs from othersources, including not only other bird species but also soundsfrom insects and frogs and even mechanical noises [2].

So these nonhuman adult animals can cunningly imitatemusic that others have created. It is often hard even for ex-perts to distinguish a yellow warbler or a ringing cell phonefrom a crafty mockingbird.

Another question is whether human animals who are notCreative Artists, such as musically inexperienced juvenile hu-mans, also possess the ability to so closely imitate genuinemusic that it can fool expert judges. If so, we must take the po-tential existence of not-music as a worrisome reality.

© 2002 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 12, pp. 53–58, 2002 53

A B S T R A C T

The author poses thequestion whether or not thosewho are not bona fide artistsgenerate “genuine music.” Hediscusses his research onchildren, animals and resultantnetworks that cunningly assem-ble collections of soundsdesigned to fool listeners intobelieving them to be genuinemusic created by true com-posers.

Dave Soldier (composer), 247 West Broadway #3, New York, NY 10013, U.S.A. E-mail:�ds43@columbia.edu�.

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MatarileA nichtmusikal example is Matarile, cre-ated by a dozen second-generation Dominican-American children, 6 to 8years old, from Harlem. The kids werethrilled when they arrived at the Acmerecording studio in Mamaroneck, NewYork, with its autographed album coversof Willie Colón and Slick Rick on thewalls.

With no knowledge of fifth speciescounterpoint or sonata allegro form, thechildren could tell stories, run aroundand create havoc in the studio without re-hearsal. They could imitate cars and dif-ferent makes of guns—this was an era inthe early 1990s when gunshots wereheard most evenings in their neighbor-hood. They also jumped rope andchanted schoolyard rhymes. The school-yard melody they chose to record,“Matarile,” like “Ring around the Rosie,”is an adorable nursery rhyme about pre-mature death. “Matarile” probably de-rives from the period of the Spanish warsbetween the Christians and Ottomans,perhaps 100 years prior to “Ring aroundthe Rosie,” an English tune that likelyarose during the bubonic plagues of the14th century:

Ambos ado mata rile rile rileambos ado mata rile rile ohque que usted mata rile rile rileque que usted mata rile rile oh

Two of the kids insisted on how thepiece was to end: with a patty-cake rhymewhose message contrasts with that of“Matarile”:

Mama mama I feel sickcall the doctor quick quick quickdoctor doctor when I diecall my mama and count to fiveI say one-two-three-four-fiveI’m alive

The children don’t think of themselvesas composers and know no instruments.Yet they craftily manufactured a 9-minuteextended work that sounds suspiciouslylike music. Perhaps, these kids could posea threat to genuine music?

How does their creation fare on theAdapted Turing Test? The researcherstested it on six musically sophisticatedhuman adults. Five of six correctly chosethe genuine music (Beethoven #6, first 45seconds) over 45 seconds of Matarile.Thus, the strong definition holds for thisexample, except for one human, wholikely was being willfully contrary.

The Tangerine AwkestraA tougher hurdle comes from the juvenilehumans in the Tangerine Awkestra, trou-blemakers aged 2 to 9 who hail from FortGreene, Brooklyn, New York. These ne-farious tots pose a deeper challenge to thestrong definition by producing soundsusing instruments. That is, they producenonmusical sounds on genuine musical in-struments that they don’t know how to play.

These children met in a schoolroom,where they listened to records by OrnetteColeman and Roscoe Mitchell of the ArtEnsemble of Chicago played by theirteacher, Katie Down. The children saidthey could do that. Down said they couldNOT. The kids said can TOO. Down saidcould NOT and brought her own collec-tion of musical instruments to school.

The kids immediately became Artistsand formed a band. With Down and herinstrument collection, they had every-thing they needed, except their parentsto drive them back and forth to re-hearsals (Fig. 2).

The Awkestra (der. the Brooklyn pro-nunciation) used Down’s instruments tocreate a classic of the nichtmusik genre,the extended orchestral work Aliens TookMy Mom.

The day before their studio debut, thekids were informed that making CDs wasdifferent from jamming noise in theclassroom. There should be a story toguide what they would record. Thus, theintention was to produce a lowbrow pro-grammatic effort rather than highbrow,pure, genuine music.

The children voted between a cowboyand Indian or astronaut subject, and thespace story won. They decided that the

story should be one of an alien invasion;and, like a pint-size politburo, they col-lectively ordered the events.

1. Aliens invade from Jupiter2. Spaceships over the Empire State

Building3. Volcanoes explode at the center of

the earth4. The aliens blow up Antarctica5. Aliens took my mom6. The Navy bombs them7. All of the humans blow up9. The aliens get nuclear bugs in them

and pop10. Everything is soft

The Awkestra selected the instrumentsto be used for each movement, a simplechore, except that some boys wanted tobang on the drums on every tune. Theminiature sovizdat solved this problem byplacing two or three boys on the drumkit.

Note that the term collective composingis an oxymoron, as Art clearly stems fromthe heroic will of the individual Artist. Noclaim is made that a child syndicate cre-ated genuine music, only that they pro-duced nonmusical sounds cunninglyarranged to fool listeners into thinkingthat they are hearing music.

Now for the results from the AdaptedTuring Test. In front of five sophisticatedadult humans, the researchers played tworecordings by acknowledged great musi-cians from the Knitting Factory label, al-ternating with the Tangerines. Themajority of humans identified the gen-uine music correctly in 5 of 8 trials, andchose the not-music in the remainingthree. This frequency of correct choiceswas too low to reach a statistically signif-icant level of detection of noughtmusik in-festation (Fig. 3). Indeed, the true failurerate might have reached 50%, if not foran artifact—that in some recordings, little-kid voices could be heard in thebackground.

Unfortunately, because the AdaptedTuring Test does not provide ironcladprotection from the Tangerine Awkestra,we cannot distinguish creators who areArtists from those who cunningly pre-tend to be Artists. Therefore, the strongdefinition of genuine music is untenable.

NAUGHTYMUSES, A WEAK DEFINITIONClearly, we must divine a definition ofgenuine music. If this were a test ofhuman intelligence, we could conduct anInverse Turing Test by asking the com-puter if a human were at the otherTelePrompTer. However, available CD

54 Soldier, Eine Kleine Naughtmusik

Fig. 1. The male NorthernMockingbird, Mimus poly -glottos. (Photo © DaveSoldier)

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players are not sufficiently well designedto indicate whether they suspect thattheir auditors are either human orArtists.

Let us then posit a weak definition ofgenuine music as follows. While perhapsgenuine music can be created by artistswho don’t know what they’re doing (aswith the Tangerine Awkestra), the weakdefinition requires that to be a memberof the set {genuine music}, the creatorsat least possess the intent to produce it.That is, genuine music cannot be createdby zombies.

Thus, by the weak definition, membersof the set {genuine music} can be empir-ically identified by determining that thecomposer intended to produce the work.How can we determine someone else’sintent? How do we know if the boss onlytells us what he thinks we want to hear,when a lover is lying, if a birdling reallymeans it when she parrots her teacher?

Amazingly, there are established areasof academic discipline that deal withzombie studies and other questions of im-portance. Theoreticians of consciousnessoften rely on a small number of improb-able gedankenexperiments to illustratetheir points, prominently including JohnSearle’s “Chinese room” [3]. A man sitsin a room receiving manuscripts in Chi-nese and translating them into English.However, he understands no Chinesehimself and simply uses a dictionary anda set of instructions to assign to each Chi-nese character its corresponding Englishword. The instructions are so good thatno observer can tell that the man doesnot understand what he is translating.

That is, the task requires no conscious in-tent, no interior consciousness, and theman could be a zombie.

By the weak definition, composer zom-bies analogous to translator zombies areprohibited from creating genuine music.A composer zombie would have no con-scious intent to create music but wouldcreate it anyway. Obviously, composerzombies would pose a diabolical threatto the well-being of genuine music.

THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE “MUSIC”The following case suggests that some-thing that all too closely resembles gen-uine music can be created without thepresence of interior consciousness.

Following a project of the New Yorkartists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid,who had earlier surveyed the masses todesign the most wanted and least wantedpaintings [4], a survey was designed bythe researchers to determine preciselywhat people “liked” and “hated” inmusic. The survey was administered to500 Americans.

The questions, with the most frequentsurvey replies in parentheses, were:

1. Please indicate your three favoritemusical instruments: ___. (guitar,piano, bass)

2. My most favorite of all musical in-struments is: ___. (guitar)

3. My least favorite musical instrumentis ___ and I also don’t like ___. (ac-cordion, bagpipe)

4. My favorite duration for a musicalcomposition is: ___. (5 minutes)

5. I prefer listening to music at a volumemost people consider: ___. (moder-ate to loud)

6. I most dislike listening to music at avolume that most people consider:___. (very quiet/very loud)

7. I most prefer music played at a speedthat is: ___. (medium tempo)

8. My favorite music tends to be per-formed by ___. (3 to 10 musicians)

9. When I listen to music, the primaryresponse I usually seek is: ___. (to af-fect mood)

10. The response least important for mein listening to music is usually: ___.(as background)

11. The most important attribute for mein a composition is that it: ___.(moves the emotions)

12. My favorite song subject is about: ___.(a love story)

13. I most hate hearing songs about: ___.(holidays, cowboys)

14. I most like listening to music: ___. (athome)

Soldier, Eine Kleine Naughtmusik 55

Fig. 2. The members of theTangerine Awkestra in the stair-case during a break in therecording session. (Photo © Neil Budzinski)

Fig. 3. A comparison between genuine musicfrom the Knitting Factory record label andthe nonmusic of the Tangerine Awkestra by theAdapted Turing Test. Five sophisticated adulthumans correctly identified the genuinemusic in five of eight trials and chose the nyet-myuzhik in the remaining three. The number� standard error of correct (column A) andincorrect (column B) responses by fivehuman respondents for each trial is shown.The null hypothesis that auditors could notcorrectly distinguish between the recordingswas not clearly disproved (Probability p �0.23, chi-square paired test for independence,7 degrees of freedom.) (© Dave Soldier)

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15. I most hate listening to music: ___.(as background for commercials)

16. I most like hearing singing by: ___. (alow man’s voice)

17. I most like hearing singing by a fe-male voice in what register: ___. (alow woman’s voice)

18. I most hate hearing singing by: ___.(a children’s choir)

19. My most favorite singer sings in a mu-sical style best described as: ___.(rock, rhythm & blues)

20. My least favorite singer sings in a mu-sical style best described as: ___.(opera, rap)

The results from this survey were fedto a locally written software program togenerate two knotmusic works, the MostWanted Music and the Most UnwantedMusic.

The Most Wanted Music was a love storysung by low bluesy voices, with moderatevolume and tempo, of 5 minutes in dura-tion. The orchestra was chosen solely bythe vox populi using plots of the preferencelevels of the instruments [5] (Fig. 4a).

The Most Unwanted Music featured achildren’s choir (Fig. 4b) singing holi-day commercials; a high-pitched oper-atic soprano rapping about cowboys;extremely loud and soft volumes; andbagpipe, banjo, piccolo, church organand tuba. It had a temporal duration of20 minutes.

The classic performance of these twoworks was for a production of a VH1television show, Rock Candy, at Shine, adance club off Canal Street in New YorkCity. Doug Stone brought in a cameracrew who filmed the unsuspecting club-goers dancing to disco until they becameused to the cameras. Then, the DJslipped in the Most Wanted Music. Al-though for all of the previous dancescouples danced separately, they startedto hold each other and nuzzle. When thesong was finished, the audience brokeinto applause, something that hadn’t oc-curred following any of the other songsthe DJ played.

This was followed by a return to about20 minutes of typical club dancingmusic, lulling the crowd into a sense ofnormalcy. Then, the DJ slipped in theMost Unwanted Music. About 5 secondsinto the piece, the dancing stopped.Forty seconds after that, someonescreamed to the DJ booth: “Turn it OFF!Turn it OFF!” Brilliantly conducted byMaestro Stone, who took no bow, and itplays on reruns.

Those who created the People’s ChoiceMusic, the masses, had no intent or un-

derstanding of what they were creating;they simply answered a series of poll ques-tions. The attributes of these two workswere decided without individual intentand are in no sense Art. No creative decision-making was involved. Yet it socleverly imitates music that the listenercould be fooled. This example proves thatmusic can be created without intent, andto that extent, could be created by zom-

bies. Even the weak definition of genuinemusic cannot be defended, and genuinemusic lovers may be in serious trouble ofbeing fooled by nichtmusik imitation.

NOTTALOTTAMUSES, THEDESPERATE DEFINITIONStill, this characterization of the People’sChoice Music may be too glib or too clever

56 Soldier, Eine Kleine Naughtmusik

Fig. 4a. Complete response to the first inquiry of the survey of musical preferences anddislikes: “Please indicate your three favorite musical instruments.” The average preferencefraction was assigned a value of 0%. Therefore, the instruments used in the Most WantedOrchestra were those with bars that fall to the right. (© Dave Soldier)

Fig. 4b. Complete responses to inquiries 16, 17 and 18: “I most like hearing singing by ___; Imost like hearing singing by ___; I most hate hearing singing by ___.” The light bars in thefront row indicate the percentage for each vocal type that was liked; the dark bars in the rearrow indicate the percentage for each disliked vocal type. (© Dave Soldier)

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by half. It’s true that the “music” was cre-ated without interior consciousness; butit was created by a mass of 500 humansmaking collective decisions. Certainly,with such a large and complicated inter-twining of what is in effect a neural net-work, an apparent form of consciousness,an exterior type, of which none of thecomponents are unaware, forms sponta-neously. The end result is a product ofthe People’s Will, the will of the masses(volkmusik) rather than the individualheroic will of the Artist. The work is com-posed by an übermind of human compo-nents.

Let us propose another definition, alogical, final and desperate last stand forthe artistic integrity of genuine music.Let the desperate definition of genuinemusic be volkmusik, an emblem of theglory of our species.

The Thai Elephant OrchestraBefore Darwin, humans weren’t animals,and animals couldn’t create genuinemusic. After The Origin of Species and TheDescent of Man, the rule was revised to theeffect that humans are the only animalswho can play music. Nonhuman animalsare so similar to humans that we can usethem to understand how humans can dosuch amazing things; they have the rightbrain parts and everything, which makesthem OK to study. But those nonhumananimals somehow are cut off from actu-ally getting down to making the realthing, genuine music.

One species that shares with humansthe honor of jumbo-sized brains is thelong-lived and highly social Asian ele-phant, Elephas maximus [6]. The impos-sibility of elephant music was recentlytested by a group of Asian elephants innorthern Thailand, at the Thai ElephantConservation Center near Lampang.This is the first government-funded cen-ter established for the long-term futureof the domesticated Asian elephant, butit also requires ongoing funds fromtourism for its upkeep. Those who livewith the elephants and understand thembest, their mahouts, know that elephantslike to listen to human music.

In order to establish an orchestra thatcould perform for Thai tourists, and thusraise ongoing support for the Conserva-tion Center, the elephants were tested todetermine if they could perform on spe-cially designed musical instruments.Such instruments would need to be op-erable by the trunk, and be large andstrong enough to stand up to very pow-erful animals and monsoons.

Altogether, the 12 members of theThai Elephant Orchestra attempted over20 instruments and mastered about halfof them to the extent that they could im-provise a broad variety of sounds [7]. Afew were mass-produced Western instru-ments, particularly harmonicas anddrums. The harmonicas were particularlywell adapted, and the elephants some-times blow them into their own ears. Themost successful results to date have beenattained with adapted versions of Easterninstruments, particularly reed instru-ments known as khaens, a tuned rattleknown as an angalung, and the center-piece of the orchestra, an instrument onwhich the elephants improvise melodiesfor minutes at a time: a Southeast Asianxylophonelike instrument known as therenat.

The Elephant’s XylophoneThe Thai Elephant Orchestra primarilyuses the “Lanna” Thai five-note scale,which the elephants are most used tohearing from the mahout’s string band.In standard nomenclature, these notesare the fundamental, a minor third, aperfect fourth, a perfect fifth, a minorseventh and an octave. It is also commonto use the minor third as a fundamentalas a major mode. Although there wassome variation from one string instru-ment to the next and between differentgroups, the scale was approximated forthe renats using a “just intonation,” orpitches expressed by simple ratios.

Traditional Thai renats are made ofbamboo or rosewood and will not standup to elephant use. To adapt the scale forthe elephants performing in the forest,large steel tubes were cut and suspended.

To suspend the pipes, holes were cutat the nodes, the points at which thepipe’s vibration amplitude are least. Finally, the pipes were attached to astrong wooden or metal frame with rope(Fig. 5), using knots or plastic spacers toprevent the pipes from clumping.

The elephants, like the human chil-dren in the Tangerine Awkestra, requirelittle training to perform. Generally, amahout demonstrates the instrument,and the elephant begins to play almostimmediately. They experiment a bit onwhere to hit the instruments and deter-mine, usually by the third afternoon ses-sion, how to make the instrument soundbest. Their decisions are invariably thesame as human taste, e.g. hitting thepipes where they make a ringing soundrather than a clink.

The musical works by the elephantshave followed two general directions. Inthe first, a human cues the elephantswhen to enter and when to stop. The mu-sical decisions between these cues are upto the individual elephant. To date, theelephants do not begin to play sponta-neously, unless one of their friends is al-ready playing—however, this may changeas they continue to develop as perform-ers. Often the elephant will continuelong after a human asks it to stop, caus-

Soldier, Eine Kleine Naughtmusik 57

Fig. 5. The renat in action as played byPratidah, then a 7-year-old. (Photo ©Neil Budzinski).

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ing consternation to the frantically ges-ticulating human, possibly delighting theelephant. One might imagine trying totell a 10,000-pound animal to stop play-ing a drum when she doesn’t want to.

The other style is compositional andwas initiated by the mahouts. In this style,the mahouts teach the elephants to per-form human tunes as a hocket, with eachelephant playing a single pitch of thescale. As of this writing, they have learnedone such tune, a Thai nursery rhyme,“Chang Chang Chang,” which consists of44 notes. It is played on a large series oftuned angalungs.

It may be noted that not only does theuse of nursery rhymes show up in severalexamples, but that the younger elephants(those under 12) tend to learn the morecomplex instruments more easily thanthe older elephants (those in their 30sand 40s).

Please decide for yourself how to de-fine what the elephants are doing by vis-iting them in Lampang, Thailand, wherethey now perform daily concerts [8]. It’sa great opportunity to spend time withelephants in the jungle and take lessonsin elephant riding and mahoutship train-ing.

Naught a Fit Not Out for Mannor BeastNow that the elephant instruments exist,have these wily beasts have figured outtricks to outfox humans? They sailthrough the Adapted Turing Test! Todate, no one, including a professionalmusic critic from the New York Times whowill remain nameless, was able to identifythe work as nichtmusik, although thatcritic ventured to suggest the works wereperformed by several chamber musicgroups that appear annually at MerkinConcert Hall near Lincoln Center. In-deed, when asked if the sounds were orweren’t music, and if not informed of theidentity of the performers, all questionedhave replied, “Of course it’s music.”

WHY WORRY?A reason for concern: Economic theorystates that less expensive modes of pro-duction will eventually overtake more ex-pensive, labor-intensive methods. Mostmultiple-part orchestral works require 2days or more to record, and weeks ofsplices and edits before they can be re-leased. The entire CD by the TangerineAwkestra, which lasts for nearly an hour,was recorded in 2 hours and contains noedits, overdubs or splicing. The total stu-dio costs were $200 U.S. The cost of onegenuine orchestral symphony by a real or-chestra would go to produce 500 newCDs by the Tangerines. The current bud-get for a Metropolitan Opera productionis $4 million: the idea that 20,000 newCDs by the Tangerines could be recordedwith that budget shows the historical in-evitability of takeover by naughtimusik.

Clearly, a flood of recordings releasedby the Tangerine Awkestra would eradi-cate the entire orchestral repertoire. Per-haps more worrisome is that elephantstruly play for peanuts, in massive quanti-ties, and don’t care for cash money.

In summary, there is something outthere that looks, sounds, feels, smells likemusic, but isn’t. It’s made by animals, in-cluding juvenile humans, to resemblegenuine music. These culprits can rangefrom tiny songbirds through smallhuman children to the largest land ani-mals, elephants. We must hope thatheroic music critics and others who un-derstand this will rush to help, or one daythey could fool us all.

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to the late Rigglius the cat,a fine nocturnal pianist who developed a gracefulstyle from extended techniques. The researchersthank fellow fifth columnists Linda Wilbrecht, LinzyEmery, Richard Lair and the staff of the Thai Ele-phant Conservation Center, Neil Budzinski, RoryYoung, Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid, Katie Down,Nina Mankin, Bernardo Palumbo, Lisa Haney, KenButler, Sara Tucker, Jane Bausman, Nic Collins andPatricia Bentson, the late Otto Luening, KatherineLuening, and Ayo Osinibi.

References

1. A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelli-gence,” Mind 59 (1950) pp. 433–460. This much-cited paper is currently available on-line at�http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm�.

2. Examples of male mockingbird songs can be down-loaded from the Cornell University Macaulay Libraryof Natural Sounds web page at �http://birds.cornell.edu/LNS/�.

3. J. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behav-ioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980) pp. 417–424.

4. J. Wypijewski, ed., Painting by Numbers: Komar andMelamid’s Scientific Guide to Art (New York: Farrar,Straus & Giroux, 1997). The most wanted and leastwanted paintings by Komar and Melamid can beviewed at �http://www.diacenter.org�.

5. The piece was written by the respondents and ex-ecuted by statistical analysis. The arrangements wereby the research team. The public should be held re-sponsible.

6. The best book on the domesticated Asian elephantis Richard Lair, Gone Astray: The Care and Managementof the Asian Elephant in Domesticity (Bangkok, Thai-land: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) ofthe United Nations, 1997). For copies, e-mail theFAO at: �fao-rap@field.fao.org�.

7. Many of the same elephants who play in the ThaiElephant Orchestra are also students at Komar’s andMelamid’s Elephant Art Academy, and their workscan be viewed at �http://www.elephantart.com�.This site also has contact information for visits to theThai Elephant Orchestra’s daily concerts at the ThaiElephant Conservation Center in Lampang.

8. Wypijewski [4].

A Naughtmusik Discography

All of the following naught-musical phenomena canbe ordered through �http://www.mulatta.org�.Naught-musical examples can also be downloaded atno cost from this site.

The People’s Choice Music, Mulatta Records MUL 001(1997).

Smut, featuring Matarile, Avant Records CD (1994).

The Tangerine Awkestra, Aliens Took My Mom, Mu-latta Records CD MUL002 (2000).

The Thai Elephant Orchestra, Mulatta Records CDMUL004 (2001).

Manuscript received 7 January 2002.

Dave Soldier is a composer, performer and re-search scientist who as of this writing is alivein New York City.

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