“Cellular Automata Music Composition: a Bio-Logical Inspiration” presented by Miranda

‘Today it is becoming increasingly common for the composer to turn to the sciences to supplement his or her compositional model’. On the other hand scientists also seem to show interest in the organisational principles found in music. We are particularly interested in promoting such interdisciplinary activities. Our motivation is twofold. On the one hand it is believed that scientific models carry an important component of human thought, namely formal abstraction, which can be very inspiring for music composition. On the other hand we would Iike to raise certain questions like: ‘What can be the justification for using science as a compositional tool’, or ‘Which aspects of science are applicable to music and how it can be done’. Obviously there are no simple answers for these and indeed we do not intend to provide any here. We believe though that each artist should be able to make her or his own judgements. As far as these questions are concerned, the work introduced in this paper is to be regarded only as a contribution for empirical experimentation. Our research work attempts to identify correlation among different disciplines such as biology, crystallography, and computing, in order to investigate the possibility of composing music inspired by a framework of interdisciplinary knowledge.