Computer music as cognitive approach: Simulation, timbre and formal processes
Jean-Baptiste Barrière · Contemporary Music Review · 1989
In this article, I consider timbre to be the set of material/organization interactions leading to the elaboration of a form. Given this framework, the goal is to formalize constraints through a process of unifying control over these interactions by exploiting the theory of formal systems: composition is considered first as the action of composing symbols, combined into propositions which are mutually generated through the application of inference rules. In addition, the emergence of new structures is explored through materials produced via simulation methodology, in the evolving processes of modeling, hybridization, interpolation, extrapolation, and abstraction. There then arises the question of a theory of references which can describe centripetal and centrifugal elements, controlling and structuring them. The critical and selective process of arriving at discrete structures can be performed in a heuristic fashion as a function of causal determination based on the classic distinction between excitation and resonance modes. In this context, the representation with which (and on which) one can operate becomes a key issue. The ambition is to develop a grammar of formal processes, a morphogenesis. The conceptual graphs and semantic networks thus developed can be considered as veritable generators of forms, offering control over the trajectories and paths along which musical material can be elaborated, diverted, transformed.