Creating a Digital Mirror of Creative Practice

Abstract

This paper describes an ongoing project to create a "digital mirror" to my practice as a composer of contemporary classical music; that is, a system that takes descriptions (in code) of aspects of that practice, and reflects them back as computer-generated realisations. The paper describes the design process of this system, explains how it is implemented, and gives some examples of the material that it generates. The paper further discusses some broader issues about the technological approach to building creative systems, in particular the advantages and disadvantages of building bespoke algorithms for generating creative content vs. the use of optimisation or learning from examples.