Saturday, June 7, 2014

Teleology in Algorithmic Composition Software

"Also characteristic... is Schenker's emphasis on organic and teleological (purpose and goal rather than cause and effect) interpretations of the world around him." - 
- http://www.schenkerguide.com/historicalcontext.html


This is closely connected with Schenker's "organicism":


Schenker suggested various ways in which music could be understood as organic:
• he proposed that music can be understood as growing and developing in successive layers from a simple seed - the fundamental structure 
• he suggested that the fundamental descent spanned and generated a whole work and thus helped make it a coherent whole 
• he showed how works were unified by patterns that recurred on different layers of the piece - known as parallelisms 
• his explanation of how tonal music is derived from the harmonic series explicitly refers to music's natural tendency for growth
- http://www.schenkerguide.com/organicism.html


'music is never comparable to mathematics or architecture, but only to language, a kind of tonal language' (Heinrich Schenker - Free Composition, p. 5)


(concerning the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake) 
"Organisms are clearly more than just complex machines: no machine has ever been known to grow spontaneously from a machine egg or to regenerate after damage! Unlike machines, organisms are more than the sum of their parts; there is something within them that is holistic and purposive, directing their development toward certain goals."
- http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-shl.htm



The Transformation Engine runs like most computer software as a "cause and effect" engine. The chord changes - a cause - and therefore the pitch choices of the diminutions change (via the mode tables.)

How to build a more "goal-oriented" system?

1) Perhaps use the voice-pitch from the next chord while creating diminutions based on the current chord? Would need to separate 

atomadr hsstruct LOAD.VOICE#s
from  hsstruct dup +ModeTable.00 LOAD.MT.HARMONIC    \ close to verbatim
hsstruct dup +ModeTable.01 LOAD.MT.MELODIC     \ most generous
hsstruct dup +ModeTable.02 LOAD.MT.VERBATIM    \ used to be LOAD.MT.GTR
etc. 
in INSTALL.CHORD.INTO.HARMONIC.STRUCTURE



2) A "pre-influence" parameter that could be set per chord, to adjust the when it comes into effect before the chord actually changes.