Evan X. Merz

The Signal Culture Group just published The Signal Culture Cookbook. I contributed a chapter titled "The Mapping Problem", which deals with issues surrounding swarm intelligence in music and the arts. Swarm intelligence is a naturally non-human mode of intelligent behavior, so it presents some unique problems when being applied to the uniquely human behavior of creating art.

The Signal Culture Cookbook is a collection of techniques and creative practices employed by artists working in the field of media arts. Articles include real-time glitch video processing, direct laser animation on film, transforming your drawing into a fake computer, wi-fi mapping, alternative uses for piezo mics, visualizing earthquakes in real time and using swarm algorithms to compose new musical structures. There's even a great, humorous article on how to use offline technology for enhancing your online sentience – and more!

And here's a quote from the introduction to my chapter.

Some composers have explored the music that arises from mathematical functions, such as fractals. Composers such as myself have tried to use computers not just to imitate the human creative process, but also to simulate the possibility of inhuman creativity. This has involved employing models of intelligence and computation that aren't based on cognition, such as cellular automata, genetic algorithms and the topic of this article, swarm intelligence. The most difficult problem with using any of these systems in music is that they aren't inherently musical. In general, they are inherently unrelated to music. To write music using data from an arbitrary process, the composer must find a way of translating the non-musical data into musical data. The problem of mapping a process from one domain to work in an entirely unrelated domain is called the mapping problem. In this article, the problem is mapping from a virtual swarm to music, however, the problem applies in similar ways to algorithmic art in general. Some algorithms may be easily translated into one type of art or music, while other algorithms may require complex math for even basic art to emerge.

Donate to the Signal Culture Group to get the full book!

On October 4, I will be presenting at the 3rd Annual Workshop on Musical Metacreation. I will be presenting a paper on the ways that AI practitioners have used ad hoc methods in algorithmic music programs, and what that means for the field of computational creativity. The paper is titled Implications of Ad Hoc Artificial Intelligence in Music Composition.

This paper is an examination of several well-known applications of artificial intelligence in music generation. The algorithms in EMI, GenJam, WolframTones, and Swarm Music are examined in pursuit of ad hoc modifications. Based on these programs, it is clear that ad hoc modifications occur in most algorithmic music programs. We must keep this in mind when generalizing about computational creativity based on these programs. Ad hoc algorithms model a specific task, rather than a general creative algorithm. The musical metacreation discourse could benefit from the skepticism of the procedural content practitioners at AIIDE.

The workshop is taking place on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, NC. Other presenters include Andie Sigler, Tom Stoll, Arne Eigenfeldt, and fellow NIU alumnus Tony Reimer.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Disconnected, an album of algorithmic sound collages generated by pulling sounds from the web.

I prefer to call this album semi-algorithmic because some of the music is purely software-generated, while other pieces are a collaboration between the software and myself. Tracks four and six are purely algorithmic, while the other tracks are a mix of software-generated material and more traditionally composed material.

The software used in the sound collage pieces (1, 3, 4, 6) was inspired by Melissa Schilling's Small World Network Model of Cognitive Insight. Her theory essentially says that moments of cognitive insight, or creativity, occur whenever a connection is made between previously distantly related ideas. In graph theory, these types of connections are called bridges, and they have the effect of bringing entire neighborhoods of ideas closer together.

I applied Schilling's theory to sounds from freesound.org. My software searches for neighborhoods of sounds that are related by aural similarity and stores them in a graph of sounds. These sounds are then connected with more distant sounds via lexical connections from wordnik.com. These lexical connections are bridges, or moments of creativity. This process is detailed in the paper Composing with All Sound Using the FreeSound and Wordnik APIs.

Finally, these sound graphs must be activated to generate sound collages. I used a modified boids algorithm to allow a swarm to move over the sound graph. Sounds were triggered whenever the population on a vertex surpassed a threshold.

Disconnected is available for download from Xylem Records.

I recently supplied the score for the latest episode for the Office Problems web show.

This week Erin and I will be down in Long Beach to participate in SoundWalk 2013. The End of My Career will be played at one of the locations.