Musical Automata as Dynamical Systems

Adaptive Behavior, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006, pp. 105–134. SAGE Publications, doi:10.1177/105971230601400205.

This paper explores the use of dynamical systems as a framework for understanding how musically autonomous behavior can be achieved in artifact. Just as dynamics has offered a breakout strategy for the perceived limitations of artificial intelligence, so too can dynamics offer a solution to the current limitations of autonomous generative music systems. By studying the biophysics of birdsong, a dynamics-based agent template is developed with particular focus given to the actuator.

Artificial Anuran Choruses

A-Life for Music: Music and Computer Models of Living Systems, edited by Eduardo Reck Miranda, A-R Editions, 2007

Although chorus models can be useful to composers working with agent-based artificial-life (a-life) models in music by providing a biologically plausible mechanism for rhythmic coordination, these models can alternatively be used to produce a different kind of a-life–based music altogether. Rather than a wholesale appropriation of the algorithms for creative inspiration, an artificial chorus can capture and reproduce a musical event from the natural world as a sort of generative nature recording—a literal imitation of life.

Toward a Dark Nature Recording

Organised Sound, vol. 16, no. 3, 2011, pp. 206–210. Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/S1355771811000203

Nature sound recording has long been criticised for the artifice of the documents it produces. Joining this easy target is the implication that the form’s aesthetic frame, which often intends to promote our connection to nature, actually serves to disconnect us. This paper reviews critiques of nature sound recording and suggests that by confronting what it excludes from ‘nature’, the form might yet come to terms with ecology.