Fugue in A minor for Carbon and Silicon

This essay won or received an honorable mention for The Boothe Prize for excellence in first-year writing. The Boothe Prize recognizes and rewards outstanding expository and argumentative writing by undergraduate students in first-year classes that satisfy the WR 1 requirement. In each award-winning essay, student writers demonstrate clarity of argument, excellent integration of research-based evidence, and compelling prose style. This essay marshals arguments from diverse fields of philosophy, musicology, psychology, and computer science to explore whether musical compositions generated by a computer should be regarded as music, as art.