This thesis strongly queries the idea of classical music and jazz as most associable through the idea of ‘syncopation’. Certainly, along with elements of instrumental timbre, that aspect has established a relationship, but only superficially. In the 1920s, the crucial dependence of jazz on a lilting manner of enunciation remained obscured by a high average tempo. With the lowering of tempo in the 1930s, however, the 2:1 lilting of ‘swing’ came to the fore, and, in providing a basis for the strongest international showing by jazz musicians, showed that a view of jazz based on syncopation had lost any deeper form of relevance. This development also exposed the extent to which classical music had marginalized that manner of enunciation since the eighteenth century, and to which jazz had attracted racist views by cultivating a rhythmic type viewed as morally base.This affective vacuum drew in the composer Alban Berg, as whether deliberately or not a mediator for cultural sensitivities. In particular, Berg’s return to legato forms of polyrhythm in the 1930s came about charged with meaning, not least for a composer in the German tradition. Since classical composers could no longer use swing-like effects overtly for serious purposes, The unfashionable, indeed the transformed return by this composer to legato polyrhythm while introducing the saxophone to works as an obbligato, stands increasingly open to consideration as a form of response by him to 2:1 scansion in jazz, by creating a ‘hobbled swing’ kind of effect. The use of polyrhythmic textures and of crotchet-quaver patterns under a triplet bracket, especially in Berg’s second opera, Lulu and in his Violin Concerto, reveals an extremely unusual approach that heightens the idea of a response to swing in jazz and even points to awareness on the composer’s part.

This thesis studies rhythm from an evolutionary computation perspective. Rhythm is the most fundamental dimension of music and can be used as a ground to describe the evolution of music. More specifically, the main goal of the thesis is to investigate how complex rhythmic structures evolve, subject to the cultural transmission between individuals in a society. The study is developed by means of computer modelling and simulations informed by evolutionary computation and artificial life (A-Life). In this process, self-organisation plays a fundamental role. The evolutionary process is steered by the evaluation of rhythmic complexity and by the exposure to rhythmic material. In this thesis, composers and musicologists will find the description of a system named A-Rhythm, which explores the emerged behaviours in a community of artificial autonomous agents that interact in a virtual environment. The interaction between the agents takes the form of imitation games. A set of necessary criteria was established for the construction of a compositional system in which cultural transmission is observed. These criteria allowed the comparison with related work in the field of evolutionary computation and music. In the development of the system, rhythmic representation is discussed. The proposed representation enabled the development of complexity and similarity based measures, and the recombination of rhythms in a creative manner. A-Rhythm produced results in the form of simulation data which were evaluated in terms of the coherence of repertoires of the agents. The data shows how rhythmic sequences are changed and sustained in the population, displaying synchronic and diachronic diversity. Finally, this tool was used as a generative mechanism for composition and several examples are presented.

Die vorliegende Arbeit widmet sich der Frage, ob musikalische Rhythmen Repräsentationen semantischer Konzepte aktivieren. In die Darstellung des theoretischen Hintergrundes werden u.a. Aspekte der linguistischen Semantik, der Neurolinguistik, der Neurokognition der Musik sowie der Semiotik und der Anthropologie einbezogen. Kernstück bildet ein am Max Planck Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften in Leipzig durchgeführtes EEG-Experiment zum semantischen Priming musikalischer Rhythmen. Die Ergebnisse des Experiments werden im Kontext des Audiationsbegriffs Edwin Gordons diskutiert und ausgewertet. Die in Gordons Begriff der Audiation enthaltene, vornehmlich intramusikalische Bedeutungskonstitution wird in Frage gestellt und eine aktualisierte Beschreibung der Bedeutungskonstitution musikalischer Rhythmen angeboten.