This paper gives a personal perspective on the application and relevance of generative processes to art production. This view is that of a computer programmer, rather than that of a user of computer programs written (or hardware constructed) by others. The programmer is in the unique position of being able to describe and manipulate abstract processes which may be used as a unique means of artistic expression. This gives a greater amount of freedom to the programmer/artist than is the case when he or she is limited by programmed procedures defined by others.

Prior to the development of a formal means of specifying visual and aural events, a concrete machine or set of rules for their manipulation and a means of bringing these representations back into the world as physical events, abstract processes were things to be contemplated but not experienced. Musical and spatial notations employed by artists, engineers and others, in concert with the programming of computing hardware, have opened the way for those who wish to manipulate processes in their artistic practice.

In order to focus study and practice in the area of such generative computer art, the Center for Electronic Media Art (CEMA) has been established in Melbourne, Australia. The Center has spawned an international conference series on generative/process-based electronic art called Iteration. The perceived roles of the Center and Iteration conferences are discussed in this paper.

The label Mille Plateaux focuses on concepts like virtuality, noise, machinism and digitality. In the most simple case, digital music simulates something that does not exist as a reality; it generates something new. It is the result of the teamwork of numerous authorities such as the 'musician', the programmer and the authority of the software program. Today, computer digital music can be seen as screen-based music, i.e. sounds become visible and images audible, but one can often forget that there is no mutual correspondence; and that this is simply a mechanism whereby a given program secretly directs the programmer towards significant ways of performing, creating apparently absolute relationships between image and sound. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of software, the programmer loses insight into internal communication structures. Such complex programs are full of errors and can even act on their own initiative. Programmers and musicians who navigate through today's systems function as designers. But this is less a question of the design of a program's operation surfaces but of the programming of software and the navigation by its logic. One has to discuss the medial conditions of digital music, the more user-friendly the software, the less transparent is the medium itself; i.e. the more transparent the functions of a computer or a synthesizer (say, with the use of preset sounds), the stronger the medium proves to be non-transparent. Digital music is more about opening up given program structures; internal ramifications and program hierarchies are to be discovered.

In this vision paper I will discuss a few questions concerning the use of generative processes in composition and automatic music creation. Why do I do it, and does it really work? I discuss the problems involved, focusing on the use of interactivity, and describe the use of interactive evolution as a way of introducing interactivity in composition. The installation MutaSynth is presented as an implementation of this idea.

This article is a brief survey of academic computer music activities in New South Wales.

Ian Fredericks played a prominent role in the development of Australian electronic music and mixed media composition from the mid 1970s until 2001. His work in establishing both the SEUSS electronic music studio at Sydney University and the subsequent founding of the computer music and audio-visual composition and performance group watt with Martin Wesley-Smith in 1976, paved the way for the generations of artists that have since explored this field. The author presents lightly edited excerpts from the last interview with Ian Fredericks before his passing on 15 March 2001.

In its original rendition, Degrees of Separation: “Grandchild of Tree” (1998) is performed with cactus, outboard digital effects, and CD playback, with simple lighting. The work is a metaphor which portrays subtle transformations (or transmutations) in human existence precipitated by pervasive new technology. A new version consists of a performance with a video component and all electronics fully automated in MAX/MSP on a Macintosh Powerbook. Development of this work, and subsequent versions, have proven invaluable for my own approach to the music I compose, and for the understanding of my position in the contemporary world of computers, technology and art. This paper attempts to describe these discoveries through outlining the levels of symbolism and metaphor in the work as realised through source abstraction (both visually and aurally), spatialisation and (re-)contextualisation. It begins with the question: What is a cactus doing in the concert hall?

In quantum mechanics a particle can behave like a particle or a wave. Thus, systems of particles can be likened to a superposition of waves. Since sound can be described as a superposition of frequencies, it can also be described in terms of a system of particles manifest as waves. This metaphor between ‘particle physics’ and sound synthesis is quantitatively developed here, suggested initially from some similarities between the two domains. It is applied to a few fundamental physical principles to show how these can be sonified. The author discusses the process of using a simulated ‘atom trap’ to compose a piece that does not require a physicist to appreciate it. This metaphor blurs the distinctions between science and art, where scientific experiment becomes musical composition, and exploring a musical idea involves playing with particle system dynamics. In the future, methods like these could be used with a real system of particles – the particle accelerator will become an expressive musical instrument, and the particle physicist will become the composerscientist.

A survey is presented of developments in recent Western Australian electronic music, focusing on the geographical influence on local composers' work. The article follows specific cases of practitioners in the fields of Sound Art (Alan Lamb and Hannah Clemen), Live Electronics (Cathie Travers and the electronic music quartet Magnetic Pig), Interactive Electronics (Jonathan Mustard and Lindsay Vickery) and Noise/Lo Fi Electronics (Cat Hope and Lux Mammoth).

Although music uses sound as its medium of conveyance, music is not just sound. Although musical structures rely on the acoustics of sound-generating devices (instruments) and conveyances (concert halls, loudspeakers) and on the way the body senses the sound waves generated and transformed by these (psychoacoustics), theories of musical composition can work both with and against these principles. Music is involved in sonic discourse, sonic rhetoric, if you will, and history shows us that because of this it is a sociocultural phenomenon which reflects the times in which it is composed.

The musical use of realtime digital audio tools implies the need for simultaneous control of a large number of parameters to achieve the desired sonic results. Often it is also necessary to be able to navigate between certain parameter configurations in an easy and intuitive way, rather than to precisely define the evolution of the values for each parameter. Graphical interpolation systems (GIS) provide this level of control by allocating objects within a visual control space to sets of parameters that are to be controlled, and using a moving cursor to change the parameter values according to its current position within the control space. This paper describes Interpolator, a two-dimensional interpolation system for controlling digital signal processing (DSP) parameters in real time.

Concerning this issue's theme, we have received the following materials:

Conference Proceedings from the Australasian Computer Music Conference 1999, ‘Imaginary Spaces’ (Victoria University of Wellington) and 2000, ‘InterFaces’ (Queensland University of Technology). For further information on conferences, please refer to <http://www.acma.asn.au/conferences.html>. MikroPolyphone also publishes selected conference papers and other articles: <http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/mikropol/>.

Complete Listing for Volume 6

We introduce a system for generalised sound classification and similarity using a machine-learning framework. Applications of the system include automatic classification of environmental sounds, musical instruments, music genre and human speakers. In addition to classification, the system may also be used for computing similarity metrics between a target sound and other sounds in a database. We discuss the use of hidden Markov models for representing the temporal evolution of audio spectra and present results of testing the system on classification and retrieval tasks. The system has been incorporated into the MPEG-7 international standard for multimedia content description and is therefore publicly available in the form of a set of standardised interfaces and software reference tools for developers and researchers.