Preliminary call for papers

Music-AL Workshop 2007 

Workshop on Music and Artificial Life part of ECAL 2007

10 September 2007, Belem Cultural Centre, Lisbon, Portugal


The Artificial Life approach to music is an exciting new development for composers 
and researchers. For composers, it provides an innovative and natural means for 
generating musical ideas from a specifiable set of primitive components and 
processes, reflecting the compositional process of generating a variety of ideas by 
brainstorming followed by selecting the most promising ones for further iterated 
refinement. For researchers, such techniques are used to model the cultural 
transmission and change of a population's body of musical ideas over time. For 
example, the development and maintenance of musical styles within particular 
cultural contexts and their reorganization and adaptation in response to cultural 
exchange.

In both cases, the musical evolution can be influenced by a variety of constraints and 
tendencies built into the system, such as realistic psychological factors that influence 
the way that music is experienced, learned, stored, modified, and passed on 
between individuals. Realistic Artificial Life models of music require sophisticated 
techniques for the implementation of such constraints and tendencies, which 
involves an interdisciplinary understanding of music from different points of view, 
ranging from neuroscience and psychology, to computing and musicology.

This workshop will focus on the applications of Artificial Life to music and the tools 
needed to create and study such systems. These tools are mostly drawn from 
research into the origins and evolution of biological organisms, ecologies, and 
cultural systems on the one hand, and in part from A-life computer modelling 
methodologies on the other.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together a multidisciplinary core of musicians 
and scientists who are working at the crossroads of A-life and music, to provide a 
common ground for dialog and interaction, to highlight the latest advances, and to 
discuss the main directions for the future. Topics of the workshop include (but not 
limited to): 


o Composition and Performance
o Computational Biomusicology
o Computational Neuromusicology
o Emergent Musical Behaviour
o Modelling Techniques (Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata, Neural Nets, 
Swarms, etc.) 
o Musical Creativity 
o Origins and Evolution of Music 
o Unconventional Computing for Music (Analog Computation, Bio-computing, 
Chemical Computing, etc.) 
o Signal Processing (Audio and Music) 
o Sound-based Communication Systems in Animals and Animats 
o Sound Synthesis 
o Sensors and Actuators (for A-life music models)


In addition to scientific and technical standard research papers, composers and 
practitioners are encouraged to submit papers reporting practical applications of 
Alife to music; e.g., discussing a musical composition using Alife.

Given the wide range of topics, authors should make sure their papers are 
contextualized in the field of A-life and music so as indicate how the proposed A-life 
approach to the problem in question is contributing to music or how the music 
approach is contributing to A-life.


For more information, please refer to the Music-AL Workshop website:

http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/Musical2007/