EvoMUSART

Yesterday was the 4th European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art. Part of the much larger EuroGP and EuroCOP conferences, the workshop focused on the use of evolutionary computing techniques in the creation of both audio and visual art.

The day started out with a plenery session by Dr. Rich Terrile, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Dr. Terrile heads up the Centre for Evolutionary Computing and Automated design at JPL, which is using EC techniques to solve a variety of problems including low thrust propulsion, robotic arm movement and project scheduling. He's convinced that non-standard computing techniques are going to be the only way that NASA will succeed in complex unmanned space missions such as a possible trip to the water-rich moon Europa.

 After the plenery session, we got to the music content of the workshop which was varied and generally of high standard. Crystyn Magnus, a composer from California showed her work using GAs to evolve long compositions that inhabit virtual environments within the audio space. Alex Gounaropolous and Colin Johnson explained their pursuit of automatic timbre analysis - they are hoping to create more useable sound synthesis toolsd that would allow They imagine human composers using a set of controls that are labelled with adjectives instead of with incomprehensible numbers,making synthesized music more accessable to traditional composers. Ollie Bown and Sebastien Lexer demonstrated their efforts in using GAs is live performance, through custom patched written for MAX/MSP. They have some interesting ideas and it was refreshing to see someone concerned with live performance as well as recorded compositions.

The evolutionary art workshop occupied the end of the day and saw presentations on the use of mostly Genetic Algorithms in the creation of visual art. After some annoying technical delays and a virtually incomprehensible presentation on biofeedback interfaces, I think the most interesting sessions were the last two. Gary Greenfield showed the progression of his work with simulated robot painters, agents which created compositions, and whose behaviour was evolved to create the most interesting result. John Collomose explained how he was using GAs to streamline the process of creating painterly renderings from photographs - he was an excellent speaker and it was a shame that he had to rush through his interesting talk in just 20 minutes.

The evening took us to an event at Artpool, where 200 of us squeezed into the exhibit space for Wednesday's EvoMUSART event. There is a great variety of work in the exhibition, which I will talk about in more detail later in the week. I would show you pictures, but my camera has taken an unexpected leave of absence from my person. More on that in my next installment…