Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts

Monday, June 8, 2009

EvoSpeak

Yes, I know. Way too many new plugins lately. I can't help it, I have to find some new inspiration. The assisted compositions are falling into a rut and mGen needs some variety pretty badly. So I'm trying a new melody method, EvoSpeak.

EvoSpeak will be the first plugin featuring a true hybrid engine. It will incorporate an evolutionary system based on a grammar engine. The grammar engine will not be a derivative of WordSmith or the WordEngine, nor will it copy the format of GGrewve. This grammar engine will be based off of the lighter and more manageable GrammGen engine, with some obvious modifications for greater efficiency. I've basically developed two grammar systems and I have yet to hit the sweet spot for melodies. GrammGen introduced a very simple and very light-weight grammar system based off of loosely-defined words. The results were interesting but have failed to keep my attention for very long. The GGrewve engine brought with it a much deeper and extremely effective grammar engine. The GGrewve (and, subsequently, WordSmith) engine, however, is not altogether flexible. It basically requires MIDI files to create styles since the words are much more complex than those of GrammGen.

With the EvoSpeak engine, I hope to achieve the impressive coherence and variety of the GGrewve engine but with the efficiency and originality of the GrammGen system. The evolutionary model should allow a fundamentally simple grammar to come together into a much more complex system. Loosely speaking, the EvoSpeak engine is also a statistical model. The evolutionary model actually "evolves" via a statistical model, but "speaks" via a grammar.

Implementation is in alpha stages right now so I'm really not sure what to expect since this is my first real endeavor into evolutionary models (I tried a very, very basic evolutionary drum model as one of my first plugins ever, but it was way too simple and poorly-coded to achieve anything).

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Two Research Questions

Question: can algorithmic composition be used to compose a creative, coherent, and above-all good-sounding score?
Key Words: algorithmic composition; genetic algorithms; fractal algorithms;
Strategies: bring together creative algorithms and modules of varying types within an overarching framework to create coherency; use variation and stochastic processes to create creativity; use expert systems (heavily coded with music theory) to make sure it sounds good

Genetic composition algorithms; talks specifically about designing an “ear module” that can filter the search space of the solution to a good composition
http://www.ece.umd.edu/~blj/algorithmic_composition/icmc.95.html

Resources for algorithmic composition
http://www.flexatone.net/algoNet/

Question: can a human eye and the intelligence to interpret its output evolve within a bounded timeframe (3.8 billion years or less) from a simple patch of photoreceptor cells?
Key Words: evolution; natural selection; Darwin; irreducible complexity; intelligent design