Evolutionary Computer Music by Eduardo Reck Miranda and John Al Biles

English | Publisher: Springer, 2007 | 272 Pages | PDF | 3,3 MB
The evolutionary computation approach to music is an exciting new development for composers and musicologists alike. For composers, it provides an innovative and natural means for generating musical ideas from a specifiable set of primitive components and processes. For musicologists, these techniques are used to model the cultural transmission and change of a population's body of musical ideas over time.

In both cases, musical evolution can be guided by a variety of constraints and tendencies built into the system, such as realistic psychological factors that influence the way music is expressed, experienced, learned, stored, modified, and passed on among individuals.

This book discusses not only the applications of evolutionary computation to music, but also the tools needed to create and study such systems. These tools are drawn in part from research into the origins and evolution of biological organisms, ecologies, and cultural systems on the one hand, and from computer simulation methodologies on the other. They can be combined to create surrogate artificial worlds populated by interacting simulated organisms in which complex musical experiments can be performed that would otherwise be impossible.

This authoritative book, with contributions from experts from around the globe, demonstrates that evolutionary systems can be used to create and to study musical compositions and cultures in ways that have never before been achieved.