Emily Howell' is a computer program that composes classical music by following rules of music its programmer taught it.

Earlier this year, 6-year-old musical prodigy Emily Howell released an 11-track debut album, resembling the work of history's most renowned classical composers. But instead of receiving the praise given to Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach, the California native has become a lightning rod for controversy within the musical community.

Why? Because Emily is not human.

Emily is a computer program, and "her" ability to write original compositions has called into question whether art is as uniquely human as many like to believe.

"Can computers be creative? In the sense that they are creating something that wasn't there before, yes," says David Cope, Emily's programmer and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But so can birds and insects and volcanoes. We have reserved this notion of creativity for humans for a long time, and we are enamored of it."

As he sees it, creativity has never been a human-defining trait. This feeling of his stretches back three decades, to when Mr. Cope first dabbled in teaching music to computers. After hitting a dead end while trying to write new music on his own, Cope created a program called EMI, which he pronounces as "Emmy."

EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) would analyze the work of human composers, pick up on their musical styles, and generate new work seemingly written by the original musician. EMI created "zillions" of compositions before being scrapped for Cope's latest project, he says.