Software agents in music and sound art research/creative work: Current state and a possible direction

Composers, musicians and computer scientists have begun to use software-based agents to create music and sound art in both linear and non-linear (non-predetermined form and/or content) idioms, with some robust approaches now drawing on various disciplines. This paper surveys recent work: agent technology is first introduced, a theoretical framework for its use in creating music/sound art works put forward, and an overview of common approaches then given. Identifying areas of neglect in recent research, a possible direction for further work is then briefly explored. Finally, a vision for a new hybrid model that integrates non-linear, generative, conversational and affective perspectives on interactivity is proposed

Performing musicology in the socio-cultural space of Ukraine of the XXI century: scientific and creative discourse

At the present stage, performing musicology plays an important role in the formation and development of professional musicians. In the socio-cultural space of Ukraine of the 21st century, it continues the historical traditions of research on the formation of performers, but, at the same time, it undergoes serious transformations. The aim of the research is to identify the key, fundamental principles of performance skill in the context of today’s realities, to determine the factors influencing the reformatting of the essential features of the creative activity of musicians. The methods of work were: analysis of scientific literature, systematization of methodological complex, method of analysis and synthesis, method of thematic analysis and critical approach to discretization of musical works. The results of the work allow us to assert about radical changes in the approach to art as such, as well as in the formation of professionals and their creative activity with a change in the basic parameters of the approach to music education. The institutionalization of art currently plays a leading role in the cultural socialization of masters, but today it is not decisive. With the development of progressive methods and approaches to education, modern technologies, globalization, the process of becoming a musician becomes easier, but access to the world of art without mediation opens wide horizons for promising musicians, and, at the same time, increases the level of competition for material and non-material incentives. The study offers a new perspective on performing musicology as a promising field for further scientific work, which will allow a better understanding of the peculiarities of the formation of musicians in the socio-cultural space of the 21st century

Application of Intermediate Multi-Agent Systems to Integrated Algorithmic Composition and Expressive Performance of Music

We investigate the properties of a new Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for computer-aided composition called IPCS (pronounced “ipp-siss”) the Intermediate Performance Composition System which generates expressive performance as part of its compositional process, and produces emergent melodic structures by a novel multi-agent process. IPCS consists of a small-medium size (2 to 16) collection of agents in which each agent can perform monophonic tunes and learn monophonic tunes from other agents. Each agent has an affective state (an “artificial emotional state”) which affects how it performs the music to other agents; e.g. a “happy” agent will perform “happier” music. The agent performance not only involves compositional changes to the music, but also adds smaller changes based on expressive music performance algorithms for humanization. Every agent is initialized with a tune containing the same single note, and over the interaction period longer tunes are built through agent interaction. Agents will only learn tunes performed to them by other agents if the affective content of the tune is similar to their current affective state; learned tunes are concatenated to the end of their current tune. Each agent in the society learns its own growing tune during the interaction process. Agents develop “opinions” of other agents that perform to them, depending on how much the performing agent can help their tunes grow. These opinions affect who they interact with in the future. IPCS is not a mapping from multi-agent interaction onto musical features, but actually utilizes music for the agents to communicate emotions. In spite of the lack of explicit melodic intelligence in IPCS, the system is shown to generate non-trivial melody pitch sequences as a result of emotional communication between agents. The melodies also have a hierarchical structure based on the emergent social structure of the multi-agent system and the hierarchical structure is a result of the emerging agent social interaction structure. The interactive humanizations produce micro-timing and loudness deviations in the melody which are shown to express its hierarchical generative structure without the need for structural analysis software frequently used in computer music humanization

Collaborative creativity: The Music Room

In this paper, we reflect on our experience of designing, developing and evaluating interactive spaces for collaborative creativity. In particular, we are interested in designing spaces which allow everybody to compose and play original music. The Music Room is an interactive installation where couples can compose original music by moving in the space. Following the metaphor of love, the music is automatically generated and modulated in terms of pleasantness and intensity, according to the proxemics cues extracted from the visual tracking algorithm. The Music Room was exhibited during the EU Researchers' Night in Trento, Italy

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Annual Report of Undergraduate Research Fellows from August 2016 to May 2017

Annual Report of Undergraduate Research Fellows from August 2016 to May 2017

Computer Music Composition using Crowdsourcing and Genetic Algorithms

When genetic algorithms (GA) are used to produce music, the results are limited by a fitness bottleneck problem. To create effective music, the GA needs to be thoroughly trained by humans, but this takes extensive time and effort. Applying online collective intelligence or crowdsourcing to train a musical GA is one approach to solve the fitness bottleneck problem. The hypothesis was that when music was created by a GA trained by a crowdsourced group and music was created by a GA trained by a small group, the crowdsourced music would be more effective and musically sound. When a group of reviewers and composers evaluated the music, the crowdsourced songs scored slightly higher overall than the songs from the small-group songs, but with the small number of evaluators, the difference was not statistically significant

Embodiment and the Arts: Views from South Africa

Embodiment and the Arts: Views from South Africa presents a diversity of views on the nature and status of the body in relation to acting, advertisements, designs, films, installations, music, photographs, performance, typography, and video works. Applying the methodologies of phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, embodied perception, ecological psychology, and sense-based research, the authors place the body at the centre of their analyses. The cornerstone of the research presented here is the view that aesthetic experience is active and engaged rather than passive and disinterested. This novel volume offers a rich and diverse range of applications of the paradigm of embodiment to the arts in South Africa.Publishe