Agent-Based Graphic Sound Synthesis and Acousmatic Composition

For almost a century composers and engineers have been attempting to create systems that allow drawings and imagery to behave as intuitive and efficient musical scores. Despite the intuitive interactions that these systems afford, they are somewhat underutilised by contemporary composers. The research presented here explores the concept of agency and artificial ecosystems as a means of creating and exploring new graphic sound synthesis algorithms. These algorithms are subsequently designed to investigate the creation of organic musical gesture and texture using granular synthesis. The output of this investigation consists of an original software artefact, The Agent Tool, alongside a suite of acousmatic musical works which the former was designed to facilitate. When designing new musical systems for creative exploration with vast parametric controls, careful constraints should be put in place to encourage focused development. In this instance, an evolutionary computing model is utilised as part of an iterative development cycle. Each iteration of the system’s development coincides with a composition presented in this portfolio. The features developed as part of this process subsequently serve the author’s compositional practice and inspiration. As the software package is designed to be flexible and open ended, each composition represents a refinement of features and controls for the creation of musical gesture and texture. This document subsequently discusses the creative inspirations behind each composition alongside the features and agents that were created. This research is contextualised through a review of established literature on graphic sound synthesis, evolutionary musical computing and ecosystemic approaches to sound synthesis and control

Creative Symbolic Interaction

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Improvising in Creative Symbolic Interaction

International audienceCreative Symbolic Interaction brings together the advantages from the worlds of interactive real-time computing and intelligent, content-level analysis and processing, in order to enhance and humanize man-machine communication. Performers improvising along with Symbolic Interaction systems experiment a unique artistic situation where they interact with musical (and possibly multi-modal) agents which develop in their own ways while "keeping in style". Symbolic interaction aims at defining a new artificial creativity paradigm in computer music, and extends to other fields as well : The idea to bring together composition and improvisation by combining mathematical symbolic structures and cognitively inspired dynamical processes belongs to a general scheme that is likely to grow in many artistic and non-artistic domains

Creative Symbolic Interaction: Key Note Talk

International audienceCreative Symbolic Interaction brings together the advantages from the worlds of interactive real-time computing and intelligent, content-level analysis and processing , in order to enhance and humanize man-machine communication. Performers improvising along with Symbolic Interaction systems experiment a unique artistic situation where they interact with musical (and possibly multi-modal) agents which develop themselves in their own ways while keeping in style. Symbolic interaction aims at defining a new artificial creativity paradigm in computer music, and extends to other fields as well : The idea to bring together composition and improvisation through modeling cognitive structures and processes is a general idea that makes sense in many artistic and non-artistic domains