Authors
Luigi Pagliarini, Henrik Hautop Lund
Corresponding Author
Luigi Pagliarini
Available Online 30 June 2014.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.2014.1.1.7
Keywords
Playware, Art, Music, Graphics, Artificial Life
Abstract
MAG (an Italian acronym which stands for Musical Genetic Algorithms) is
an electronic art piece in which a multifaceted software attempts to “translate”
musical expression into a corresponding static or animated graphical expressions.
The mechanism at the base of such “translation” consists in a quite complex
and articulated algorithm that, in short, is based on artificial learning.
Indeed, MAG implements different learning techniques to allow artificial
agents to learn about music flow by developing an adaptive behaviour. In
our specific case, such a technique consists of a population of neural
networks – one dimensional artificial agents that populate their two dimensional
artificial world, and which are served by a simple input output control
system – that can use both genetic and reinforcement learning algorithms
to evolve appropriate behavioural answers to an impressively large shapes
of inputs, through both a fitness formula based genetic pressure, and,
eventually, a user-machine based feedbacks. More closely, in the first
version of MAG algorithm the agents’ control system is a perceptron; the
world of the agents is a two dimensional grid that changes its dimensions
accordingly to the host-screen; the most important input artificial agents
get (i.e. not necessarily the only one) is the musical wave that any given
musical file produces, run-time; the output is the behavioural answer that
agents produce by moving, and thereby drawing on to a computer screen,
therefore graphical. The combination of artificial evolution and the flows
of a repeated song or different musical tunes make it possible for the
software to obtain a special relationship between sound waves and the aesthetics
of consequent graphical results. Further, we started to explore the concept
of run-time creation of both music and graphical expression. Recently,
we developed a software by which it is possible to allow any user to create
new song versions of popular music with the MusicTiles app simply by connecting
musical building blocks. This creation of musical expression can happen
as a performance (i.e. run-time). When connecting the MusicTiles app to
the MAG software, we provide the connection and the possibility to melt
both musical expression and graphical expression in parallel and at run-time,
and therefore creating an audio-video performance that is always unique.
Copyright
© 2013, the Authors. Published by ALife Robotics Corp. Ltd.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).