Meeting Summary: Co-sponsored by SFI and IMéRA, the Institute for Advanced Studies of Aix-Marseille University, France, this open forum will bring together network and complexity scientists, musicologists and music theorists, composers, performers and neuroscientists to initiate an interdisciplinary discussion on music complexity in a variety of contexts. The abstraction of musical structures as geometrical spaces naturally invites the analysis of music as a complex system. In this context, one avenue is to develop a network-based approach to derive functional principles of compositional form and quantitative measures of music complexity. The introduction of well-defined metrics provides a novel framework for the quantification of musical “rules” as emergent behaviors in a complex network system and the analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures. This approach suggests a way to relate such measures to the human perception of different musical entities and explores whether these entities share universal characters across time and cultures. In a more traditional musicological approach, the analysis of a single work or a corpus of compositions as complex networks provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process of a composer by quantifying emergent behaviors with well-established statistical mechanics techniques. Finally, the knowledge acquired by this comprehensive analysis of musical spaces can be clearly generalized for the generation of algorithmically based music composition agents.
Virtual
Working Group
US Mountain Time
Our campus is closed to the public for this event.