Virtual Music

Virtual Music
Author: David Cope
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2004-01-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780262532617

Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics. The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author's responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity. The book (and corresponding Web site) includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartok, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text.

The Algorithmic Composer

The Algorithmic Composer
Author: David Cope
Publisher: A-R Editions, Inc.
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0895794543

Accompanying disc contains Melody Predictor (a program), Compose (a program), Fun, Déjà vu (a program), Backtalk, some tutorials, Alice (an interactive program), recorded performances of many of the works presented in the text, and MIDI performances of most of the music in the figures.

Musical Forces

Musical Forces
Author: Steve Larson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2012-01-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253005493

Steve Larson drew on his 20 years of research in music theory, cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology, and artificial intelligence—as well as his skill as a jazz pianist—to show how the experience of physical motion can shape one's musical experience. Clarifying the roles of analogy, metaphor, grouping, pattern, hierarchy, and emergence in the explanation of musical meaning, Larson explained how listeners hear tonal music through the analogues of physical gravity, magnetism, and inertia. His theory of melodic expectation goes beyond prior theories in predicting complete melodic patterns. Larson elegantly demonstrated how rhythm and meter arise from, and are given meaning by, these same musical forces.

Evolutionary Computer Music

Evolutionary Computer Music
Author: Eduardo R. Miranda
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2007-10-12
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 184628600X

This book discusses the applications of evolutionary computation to music and the tools needed to create and study such systems. These tools can be combined to create surrogate artificial worlds populated by interacting simulated organisms in which complex musical experiments can be performed. The book demonstrates that evolutionary systems can be used to create and to study musical compositions and cultures in ways that have never before been achieved.

Algorithmic Composition

Algorithmic Composition
Author: Gerhard Nierhaus
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2009-08-28
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3211755403

Algorithmic composition – composing by means of formalizable methods – has a century old tradition not only in occidental music history. This is the first book to provide a detailed overview of prominent procedures of algorithmic composition in a pragmatic way rather than by treating formalizable aspects in single works. In addition to an historic overview, each chapter presents a specific class of algorithm in a compositional context by providing a general introduction to its development and theoretical basis and describes different musical applications. Each chapter outlines the strengths, weaknesses and possible aesthetical implications resulting from the application of the treated approaches. Topics covered are: markov models, generative grammars, transition networks, chaos and self-similarity, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks and artificial intelligence are covered. The comprehensive bibliography makes this work ideal for the musician and the researcher alike.

Techniques of the Contemporary Composer

Techniques of the Contemporary Composer
Author: David Cope
Publisher: Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780028647371

This text is a practical guide to the compositional techniques, resources, and technologies available to composers today. Each chapter traces the development of traditional and modern elements that form the foundation of music in the late twentieth century. Among the subjects discussed are interval exploration, serialism, pitch-class sets, twelve-tone music, electronic music, algorithmic composition, and indeterminacy.

New Directions in Music

New Directions in Music
Author: David Cope
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780881339925

This text is intended as an introduction & general survey of avant-garde & post-avant-garde music in the twentieth century to the present.