The Musical Metacreation Weekend


Associated Event Title:
  • The Musical Metacreation Weekend

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Abstract:

  • The Musical Metacreation Weekend (MuMeWe2013) was held in Sydney, Australia, on June 15th and 16th 2013, hosted by two faculties of the University of Sydney: the Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, and the Conservatorium of Music. The event was timed to coincide with the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), of which it was an associated event, and also occurred alongside two conferences: the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), a AAAI conference now in its 4th year, and the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference, now in its 20th year. MuMeWe2013 can also be contextualized as part of the MuMe workshop series, the first of which, MuMe2012, occurred in October 2012 at Stanford University as part of the AAAI International conference on AI in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2012).

    Musical Metacreation describes the process of making software that in turn makes music, partially or entirely by itself. This may be in the context of a live improvised musical performance, the creation of a new recorded work or score, or as part of a hybrid creative process in which the software plays a part alongside a composer. Musical Metacreation is the site of active research into techniques and methods that enable software programs to actively engage in music creation. The field aims both to simulate existing musical processes and to develop new ways of creating music that are not possible without machines and automation. Some systems are built with the grand aim of composing original scores; others are generative artworks whose output comes from the interaction of virtual software agents, with emergent and surprising results, and still others remain creative tools in the hands of performers, examining ways in which the compositional process can be part-automated and flexibly recoded.

    This series of concerts is the result of an international response to a call for peer-reviewed works. It includes improvised duets between musicians and algorithms, algorithmically generated electronica, compositions derived from the machine learning of musical structure, and other strategies for software autonomy.

    The MuMe Weekend is presented by the Design Lab at the University of Sydney, the Metacreation Lab at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, in association with ISEA2013.
    Organising committee: Oliver Bown (University of Sydney), Arne Eigenfeldt (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Philippe Pasquier (Simon Fraser University, Canada).

    Additional local organisation: Ivan Zavada (University of Sydney), Ben Carey (UTS), Aengus Martin (UTS).

    Programme
    Saturday June 15
    11am-1pm: Panel Discussion
    5.30-8pm: Improvising Algorithms
    9-11pm: Algorave
    10am-5pm: Installations

    Sunday June 16
    3pm-4.30pm: Composed Process
    5pm-6.30pm: Studies in Autonomy
    10am-5pm: Installations

    metacreation.net/mumewe2013

    Paper: Oliver Bown, Arne Eigenfeldt, Aengus Martin, Benjamin Carey & Philippe Pasquier — The Musical Metacreation Weekend: Challenges arising from the live presentation of musically metacreative systems