Generating Structure - Towards Large-Scale Formal Generation

Metacreative systems have been very successful at generating event-to-event musical details and generating short forms. However, large-scale formal decisions have tended to remain in the hands of a human, either through an operator guiding an improvisational system along in performance, or the assemblage of shorter generated sections into longer forms. This paper will describe the open problem of large-scale generative form, and the author’s attempts at delegating such decisions to a metacreative system by describing several of his generative systems and their approach to structure. The author will describe in greater detail his latest system — The Indifference Engine — and how it negotiates between agent intentions and performance information derived from a live performer.

[1]  Jim W. Murphy,et al.  The KarmetiK NotomotoN: A New Breed of Musical Robot for Teaching and Performance , 2011, NIME.

[2]  S. Jeong.  Harmony , 2012, SIGGRAPH '12.

[3]  Andrew R. Brown,et al.  A Computational Model for the Generation of Orchestral Music in the Germanic Symphonic Tradition: A Progress Report , 2008 .

[4]  Arne Eigenfeldt,et al.  Real-time Composition as Performance Ecosystem , 2011, Organised Sound.

[5]  Simon Fraser,et al.  Real-time Composition or Computer Improvisation? A composer’s search for intelligent tools in interactive computer music , 2007 .

[6]  Arne Eigenfeldt,et al.  Negotiated Content: Generative Soundscape Composition by Autonomous Musical Agents in Coming Together: Freesound , 2011, ICCC.

[7]  Craig W. Reynolds.  Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model , 1987, SIGGRAPH.

[8]  Scott J. Simon.  Computer models of musical creativity , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[9]  Philip Galanter,et al.  What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory , 2003 .

[10]  R. Jackendoff,et al.  A Generative Theory of Tonal Music , 1985 .

[11]  E. Zwicker,et al.  Analytical expressions for critical‐band rate and critical bandwidth as a function of frequency , 1980 .

[12]  Mika Kuuskankare.  Meta-Score, a Novel PWGL Editor Designed for the Structural, Temporal, and Procedural Description of a Musical Composition , 2012, MUME@AIIDE.

[13]  Robert O. Gjerdingen,et al.  The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures , 2004 .

[14]  Arne Eigenfeldt,et al.  Creative Agents, Curatorial Agents, and Human-Agent Interaction in Coming Together , 2012 .

[15]  Karen Collins,et al.  An Introduction to Procedural Music in Video Games , 2009 .

[16]  Jon R Drummond,et al.  Understanding Interactive Systems , 2009, Organised Sound.

[17]  Richard Kronland-Martinet,et al.  Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Sense of Sounds, 4th International Symposium, CMMR 2007, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 27-31, 2007. Revised Papers , 2008, CMMR.

[18]  Eduardo Miranda,et al.  Evolutionary morphing for music composition , 2011 .

[19]  W. Dowling.  Emotion and Meaning in Music , 2008 .

[20]  C. Stevens,et al.  Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, by David Huron . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006 , 2007 .

[21]  Arne Eigenfeldt,et al.  Emergent Rhythms through Multi-agency in Max/MSP , 2008, CMMR.

[22]  Palle Dahlstedt.  A-Life for Music: Music and Computer Models of Living Systems , 2011 .

[23]  Simon Colton,et al.  Full-FACE Poetry Generation , 2012, ICCC.

[24]  E. Narmour.  Hierarchical Expectation and Musical Style , 1999 .

[25]  Arne Eigenfeldt.  Embracing the Bias of the Machine: Exploring Non-Human Fitness Functions , 2021, MUME@AIIDE.

[26]  Arne Eigenfeldt,et al.  Towards a Taxonomy of Musical Metacreation: Reflections on the First Musical Metacreation Weekend , 2021, MUME@AIIDE.

[27]  D. Schwarz,et al.  Corpus-Based Concatenative Synthesis , 2007, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[28]  Arne Wigenfeldt,et al.  Contour: A Real-time Midi System Based on Gestural Input , 1989, ICMC.

[29]  Arne Eigenfeldt.  Coming together: negotiated content by multi-agents , 2010, ACM Multimedia.

[30]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[31]  E. Negretto.  Expectation and Anticipation As Key Elements for the Constitution of Meaning in Music , 2012 .

[32]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  BDI Agents: From Theory to Practice , 1995, ICMAS.

[33]  Arne Eigenfeldt,et al.  Evolving structures for electronic dance music , 2013, GECCO '13.

[34]  Mikhail Malt,et al.  Zsa . Descriptors : a library for real-time descriptors analysis , 2008 .