The Extended Importance of the Social Creation of Value in Evolutionary Processes

This is a single-authored paper delivered at the biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in Riva del Garda, Italy 28 – 29 August 2006 and published in proceedings.

The paper proposed that computational modelling be employed in order to test two processes that might hypothetically distinguish particular dimensions of human creativity. The first process is identified by the researcher as one in which the pursuit of novelty in artistic invention – especially music – tends to words the production of increasingly perceptually complex artefacts. The second process moves from a perspective orientated towards the individual artist and the individual art work’s reception to a more collective one: namely, whether cultural behaviour that tends towards novelty might find itself being reinforced by clustering of similar activities. This latter process would be one that explains why the process of “making special” – that may distinguish art in an anthropological sense – is one that forms particularly strong community bonds. These bonds between novelty seekers – which in the case of the researchers paper can be understood as musicians or artists – may reciprocally reinforce to support yet more novelty seeking.

The relation of art and the new is not itself innovative. Boris Groys’ “On The New” provides a scoping of that territory. What is innovative is the proposal to use of computer simulation of individual and collective behaviour as a kind of artificial laboratory to determine the complex tendencies that animate these processes of novelty seeking and, by extension, artistic production.

Computationally simulating behaviour that parallels both novelty-seeking as an individual practice (the artist) and the emergence of clusters of novelty seekers (the artistic styles) may, according to the researcher, provide us with new insights the historical evolution of creativity.

Current Research
I am working with CRiSAP co-director Cathy Lane on a project to develop audio analysis software, in particular for use by composers producing artistic works with collections of speech recordings. This software will enable users to search through a database of sound for similarities in timbre or pitch content. We are making use of a state-of-the-art set of open-source low-level tools currently being developed by the OMRAS II group at Goldsmiths, University of London, which are designed to perform this task over a network for Google-style searching of music databases. Our project involves embedding this existing software in a graphical user interface program which composers and sonic artists can use creatively on their own collections of recorded sound, and aims to make the software accessible to end users without needing an understanding of the low level behaviour of audio similarity technology. As well as the development of the software, the project also involves research into the artistic practice of composing music using automatic analysis audio similarity, and in particular the specific case of the analysis of vocal sounds, and some creative works will be developed as an outcome of the project. In general this project reflects CRiSAP's commitment to research into the development of new software tools for the sonic arts, and their philosophy that the rapid development of prototype software for creative use is a valuable goal.