Origins Of Music

Sounds are synthesised from the emergent behaviour of cellular automata and a society of distributed and autonomous agents evolves sound repertoires of musical notes, melodies and rhythms from scratch by interacting with each other. Music is defined as an adaptive complex dynamic system that emerges from the overall behaviour of interacting autonomous elements in a non-hierarchical manner. These individual elements are modelled as musical-agents geared to interact with one another by means of sounds. The objectives of these on-going experiments are to establish what sort of agent interactions can bootstrap musical evolution, what physical and cognitive abilities these agents must have in order to evolve music, and what environmental constraints are necessary to foster music evolution.

Miranda, E. R. On the Origins and Evolution of Music in Virtual Worlds. Creative Evolutionary Systems, pages 189-203, Morgan Kaufmann. January 2002.

Miranda, E. R. Evolving Cellular Automata Music: From Sound Synthesis to Composition. Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life Models for Musical Applications - ECAL 2001, September 2001. Prague University of Economics

Miranda, E. R. Composing Music with Computers. Music Technology Series, Focal Press, May 2001. Book

Miranda, E. R. The Art of Rendering Sounds from Emergent Behaviour: Cellular Automata Granular Synthesis. Proceedings of the 26th EUROMICRO Conference, pages 350-355, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 2000. IEEE.

Miranda, E. R. On the Music of Emergent Behaviour: What can Evolutionary Computation bring to the Musician?. In Annie S. Wu, editor, 2000 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pages 140-142, Las Vegas, Nevada, July 2000. University of Central Florida GECCO.