We investigate the properties of a new Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for computer-aided composition called IPCS (pronounced “ipp-siss”) the Intermediate Performance Composition System which generates expressive performance as part of its compositional process, and produces emergent melodic structures by a novel multi-agent process. IPCS consists of a small-medium size (2 to 16) collection of agents in which each agent can perform monophonic tunes and learn monophonic tunes from other agents. Each agent has an affective state (an “artificial emotional state”) which affects how it performs the music to other agents; e.g. a “happy” agent will perform “happier” music. The agent performance not only involves compositional changes to the music, but also adds smaller changes based on expressive music performance algorithms for humanization. Every agent is initialized with a tune containing the same single note, and over the interaction period longer tunes are built through agent interaction. Agents will only learn tunes performed to them by other agents if the affective content of the tune is similar to their current affective state; learned tunes are concatenated to the end of their current tune. Each agent in the society learns its own growing tune during the interaction process. Agents develop “opinions” of other agents that perform to them, depending on how much the performing agent can help their tunes grow. These opinions affect who they interact with in the future. IPCS is not a mapping from multi-agent interaction onto musical features, but actually utilizes music for the agents to communicate emotions. In spite of the lack of explicit melodic intelligence in IPCS, the system is shown to generate non-trivial melody pitch sequences as a result of emotional communication between agents. The melodies also have a hierarchical structure based on the emergent social structure of the multi-agent system and the hierarchical structure is a result of the emerging agent social interaction structure. The interactive humanizations produce micro-timing and loudness deviations in the melody which are shown to express its hierarchical generative structure without the need for structural analysis software frequently used in computer music humanization.

Études was composed as a set of five interrelated movements in the followingorder: Prelude, Introduction and Fugue, Triptych, Chorale, and Response. The pieces are compositional as well as technical studies. The movements specifically explore certain styles and forms unique to organ music, and reintroduce these elements in creative ways. As in the traditional étude, each movement contains virtuosic technical studies, which are designed to enhance manual and pedal facility and prepare the performer for advanced repertoire.

The French composers Tristan Murail (b.1947) and Gerard Grisey (1946-98) are the two chief originators of “Spectral Music”, an approach to composition that developed in France from the mid-1970s, and which is characterised by the ‘spectrum’, a conception and codification of sound as a collection of individual, related partials, realised by orchestral synthesis. While the composers’ exploitation of the physical characteristics of sound, based on technological analysis, is well documented, Murail has drawn analogies throughout his mature work with other phenomena, including those associated with electroacoustic means of sound treatment and production, morphologies found in the earth’s surface (both land and water) and recently developed scientific paradigms (chaos theory and fractal geometry). In Murail’s most recent works, the complex properties of sound samples are used as compositional models. The application of these analogies is diverse, ranging from the use of relatively simple algorithms to the formation of elaborate structures that possess a highly evocative and metaphorical mode of communication. The use of inharmonic sounds, or “noise”, in particular, evokes nature and places the work in a particular relationship with the world. The thesis investigates the appropriation of phenomena by analogy through analysis of key compositions. While research focuses on Murail, the work will be contextualised alongside that of Grisey, and within Spectral Music in general, in order to gain a greater critical understanding of the music

This thesis investigates rationales behind Live Art documentation, by examining the work of British artists working under the banner of ‘Live Art' since the 1990s. My aim has been to write an account of Live Art's history and major themes that incorporates primary research, analysis and criticism of recent research on documentation. Works by Live Artists are not discussed chronologically, but so that they might function as points of departure for discussions about Live Art's relationship to documentation and its relevance as a contemporary cultural form. The thesis starts with an introduction setting out definitions of Live Art and documentation and contextualising Live Art's relationship to Performance Art. The rationales for documenting Live Art are grouped into three categories: documentation as pragmatic, documentation as memorial and documentation as holistic. The main text is divided into three parts, each part discusses issues relating to one of the above categories. Part 1 addresses practical reasons why artists working under the banner of Live Art document their work. The section includes an exploration of the infrastructure for the development of Live Art in the UK as well as an analysis of the market for Live Art and its documentation. Part 2 interrogates perspectives from the discipline of performance studies on the relationship between live action and documentation, exploring how these issues have been interpreted in Live Art's history. In particular, this section will assess how writers and artists have approached discussion of Live Art in oral and written form. Part 3 proposes models of rethinking documentation based on works by British Live Artists that develop documentation in tandem to live action and enjoy a privileged relationship to technology.

To what degree is it possible to score an artistic event for which the impetus is a social, rather than aesthetic, effect - and indeed, to what degree are these effects separable? How, in short, can the composer or artist create a blueprint for a relational practice that is fundamentally concerned more with actions within the community than it is with any outcomes or objects presented to the community? This thesis seeks to explore the role of the Other through the composition of a set of participatory scores for social activity. Devised from the perspective of a composer and sound-artist, this practice-led research investigates three strands of social engagement: collaboration, interpretation, and intervention. These strands each revolve around the problems inherent to performing and scoring socially-engaged, site-specific sound works, as well as the reality of their dissemination in the public domain. Each of the methods employed not only feeds back into the score-making process, but also serves to critique existing methods and hierarchies within artistic participation, ultimately arguing for an open-ended and non-linear relationship between the act of sensing, and the (community-influenced) construction of the sensible. Exploring post-structural, ethical, and ontological notions of what it means to share and construct community with Other, this research examines the role of art as a creative movement between self-constructs that are at once individual and indivisible from the community. This work argues that such creativity extends not only to the realisation of artworks, but across the whole gamut of activity within the social event. By undertaking practice-based research into the role of Other within the event of an artwork, this thesis interrogates the socio-political hierarchies inherent to both the specific art-event, and the pre-existing community in which such events unfold. As such, the art-event points not only to the specific creative act of its making, but equally the latent creativity within the community in which the art is disseminated. The spectator, no less than the artist, defines the terms of the community by which such acts are made available to perception as an ontological reading that is not only sensed, but sensible.

On the way to a more comprehensive and integrative historiography of music software, this paper proposes a survey of the main paradigms of music software development from the 1950s to the present. Concentrating on applications for music composition, production and performance, the analysis focusses on the concept and design of the human-computer-interaction as well as the implicit user.

The early-twentieth-century culture in western art music of idolizing the composer as the autonomous creative genius has been challenged by recent developments across musicology and creativity research literature. The composer’s music is now regarded as the product of a collaborative network, influenced by all who come into contact with it—first and foremost the performer. Yet, the nature of the performer’s creative impact on the compositional process remains under-explored. This thesis is centred on a qualitative artistic research project, designed to identify and critically evaluate the prospective extent and scope of creative performer agency; it aims to ascertain how a typical lack of familiarity with the instrument may affect the composer’s creative practice, and to reveal key factors that shape the nature and the consequences of composer-performer interaction and collaboration. It proceeds by commissioning new works for guitar from a range of composers for different performers, and by documenting and analysing the processes of collaboration that result. This research agenda challenges the perception of distinct creative roles that remains resilient in present-day cultural understandings and discourse. The findings are intended to broaden understanding of contemporary collaborative practices in the compositional process for the guitar and generalize to the guitar repertoire of the long twentieth century, during which the majority of substantial works were composed in collaboration. The thesis also contributes to a developing and generalizable framework of practice-led research literature that analyses music-making by recognizing the multiple loci and their interactions that underpin all aspects of the creative processes. Chapter 1 discusses the establishment of the creative hegemony of the composer and its opposing currents across disciplines from the late romantic period to the late twentieth century. Chapter 2 comprises an indicative chronology of select collaborations in the long twentieth-century guitar repertoire and an overview of relevant practice-led research projects in performance studies. Ethnographic methodologies are reviewed in Chapter 3 and the fieldwork commissions are analysed in Chapters 4 and 5. Finally, Chapter 6 comprises an evaluation of the performer’s creative agency and its significance when placed in broader frameworks of contemporary guitar practices, contemporary composition across instrumentations, generalizing to historical guitar collaboration and its implications for creativity research.

Title: Body Composition and Motor Performance of Roma Children in the Most District Background: The Roma way of life, or rather the values they live up to, is different from the values and way of life of the majority population. This results in a lower life expectancy of the Roma and a worse social position in Czech society, even in total social exclusion. Since the individual's lifestyle evolves from childhood on, we focused on assessing the lifestyle using several parameters of body composition and motor performance of Roma children in socially excluded Roma localities Aims: The aim of this thesis is to find out the influence of the lifestyle of Roma children living in socially excluded Roma localities in the Most district on their body composition and motor performance. The second goal is to compare the body composition and motor performance of the children from majority population and socially excluded children from the Most district with the Czech children population standards. Methods: In total 733 children 7-15 years of age participated in the study, of which 448 were from majority population of the Most district (221 girls and 227 boys) and 285 children were from socially excluded Roma localities in the Most district (124 girls and 161 boys). Bioelectric impedance analysis (BIA 2000 M...

In diesem Artikel wird das Konzept des Tonsatzseminars an der Technischen Universität Dortmund vorgestellt, das Brücken zur Komposition bauen will. Jedes Semester endet mit einem Tonsatz-Konzert, das von Studierenden mit eigenen Kompositionen bestritten wird. Die Stücke entstehen in den Tonsatzseminaren. Seminar und zugehöriges Konzert sind jeweils einem bestimmten Thema gewidmet. Die Tonsatzseminare wurden umfassend dokumentiert: Die Stücke aller Teilnehmer*innen liegen schriftlich vor, wurden im Konzert aufgenommen. Begleitet wird der Kurs in den letzten Jahren von musikpsychologischen Tests zum Kreativitäts-Selbstkonzept, die Datenmaterial für statistische Auswertungen geliefert haben. Vor dem Hintergrund musikästhetischer Diskussion im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert hinsichtlich der Anteile von ›Inspiration‹ und ›Arbeit‹ am Kompositionsprozess werden musikpsychologische Untersuchungen zur musikalischen Wahrnehmung (Carl Stumpf) und neurowissenschaftliche Grundlagen der Kreativitätsforschung dargestellt. Diese Forschungen werden im Hinblick auf ihre pädagogische Bedeutung für das Tonsatzseminar reflektiert. / In this essay, we present the concept of the Tonsatz seminar at TU Dortmund University. This seminar aims to include the idea of composition. Each series of lessons concludes with a concert with students performing their own compositions created in the Tonsatz seminars. The seminars and the recorded concert are dedicated to a specific topic. All scores and the recordings are available. In recent years, the seminars have been accompanied by psychological tests on a self-concept of creativity providing data for statistical evaluations. Against the background of music-aesthetic discussions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarding the relation between the concepts of »inspiration« and »work« in the compositional process, music psychological studies on musical perception (Carl Stumpf), and neuroscientific foundations of creativity are presented. These insights are reflected in terms of their pedagogical significance for the Tonsatz seminar in compositional techniques.