Seminar Abstract

15 Nov 2006:
Speaker: Joao Magalhaes Martins
Venue:     Devonport Lecture Theatre, Portland Square
Time:       14:00

Emergent rhythmic sequences on an A-life simulation environment

Most of the social phenomena cannot be studied by defining explicit rules for the global behaviour. The artificial life field has grasped this area by looking into bottom up approaches where the local interactions give origin to global interesting behaviours.

Music, as other cultural dimensions, is composed of artefacts that are transformed across individuals. There are several ways of studying these phenomena: from the individual point of view, or from the artefact evolution point of view, which in the case of the present study are rhythmic sequences. The A-Life framework contributes with solutions that enable a high degree of controllability of the environment enabling the study of the learning process of the agents and the evolution of the musical sequences.

This study is proposes an framework for musicologists, composers and computer scientists to observe the emergent global behaviours and the repertoires that are shared by a subsets of agents in a community, or the movement that is observed in a virtual environment as a result of the interactions. During the interaction process special focus is placed on the agent’s ability to judge similarity between sequences and complexity of a given sequence.