Jonatas Manzolli: "Live Interactive Composition and its convergence with Computational Neuroscience"

This lecture intends to discuss the convergence between ideas developed around contemporary music and ideas that have emerged from models in computational neuroscience. Music composition has evolved from symbolic notated pitches to expressions of the internal organization of sound. This can be observed in the extended instrumental techniques developed from the 1940’s onwards up to the more recent compositional strategies that have emerged from the “new interfaces for musical expression”. The dynamic organization of sound material in “real” time, however, adds new dimensions to musical information and to its symbolic representations. We are going to discuss a conceptual point of view according to which models from computational neuroscience can be applied to the development of systems that organize sound material in time, through the interaction of interactive rules and independently of symbolic notation. Conversely the real-world realization of such artifacts might also be considered as a way to further develop insights on theories of mind. To illustrate our point of view, we will present a number of musical systems that have been realized as experiments of such a “situated aesthetics” based on cognitive models of interaction.

Interdisciplinary Nucleus for Sound Studies (NICS)
Institute of Arts, Music Department
University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
Campinas, Brazil
jonatas@nics.unicamp.br