Eigenfeldt, Bown, Pasquier and Martin: Towards a Taxonomy of Musical Metacreation
This paper describes an event exhibiting recent work in the field of Musical Metacreation and proposes a taxonomy of metacreative systems.
This classification depends heavily on the notion of a musical gesture, being “any musical idea that has a beginning and an end”. This definition mostly passes the buck from “gesture” to “idea” which if anything is more vague. One might define gesture recursively as a superposition of gestures and sound objects. I’m using sound object to mean an acoustic event which streams together and seems to a human observer to represent a single source. Then, a gesture is built up from particular atoms in a particular temporal configuration; this allows for gestures which are single sounds (e.g. a snare drum hit), gestures which are patterns of sounds (e.g. a drum beat), and gestures which are patterns of other gestures (e.g. a sequence of increasingly loud but otherwise unspecific snare drum textures)
Anyway, the authors present a taxonomy which is hierarchical, from less metacreative to more:
Levels 1 and 2 involve processing of human gestures in a not completely predictable way. An independent system can do this to single gestures, while a compositional system can relate multiple gestures.
Levels 3 and 4 deal with the production of novel gestures. A generative system produces novel material when triggered by a performer; a proactive system can choose when to trigger itself. That is, it reacts in a creative way, responding to but not merely echoing what it hears.
Level 5 is more sophisticated that a generative system or has more agency than an proactive system; an adaptive system is capable of substantial evolution in its behavior over time due to internal or external conditions. Thus it can produce interesting results without human intervention. This level is divided into parts a) and b), which distinguish between holistic systems with only internal state, and agent based systems wherein each agent faces the external state given by the other agents.
Level 6, a versatile system, generalizes level 5 to be “without predefined stylistic limits”. A versatile system is capable of determining large-scale musical form; it could be said to be operating as an artist.
Level 7, a system with volition (a volatile system?) decides for itself the conditions to compose in; it operates as a person with needs and desires outside of its role as a composer.
The authors do not claim the existence of any system above level 5. I think their hierarchy is mostly sound, though levels 3 and 4 seem more parallel like 5a and 5b. For example, a generative system might reach level 5 without the power of choice implied by level 4, as in a natural process like rainstorm. Even a totally procedural work (by which I mean one which is determined at each instant entirely by a set of parameters and the current time) may appear to evolve substantially due to its rich mathematical structure. There is clearly a spectrum between each of these levels since 1 and 2 are based on the fuzzy notion of gesture and 6 is based on that of “stylistic limits”. (Are many human artists really without stylistic limits?)
Crucially, the authors point out that level in their hierarchy is not directly related to either complexity or artistic value. They propose that works in the field of metacreation should be aware of which level they aspire to, and seek to master it.
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