Swordplay: Taste of the Renaissance

Date
October 7, 2011

Speaker
Mark Spear

Abstract
It is the distant past: the year 2002. Nathan is a first-year music major who is perilously close to failing his first-semester modal counterpoint class. As he stares at the pages upon pages of badly-done voice leading assignments, he wonders whether a computer could automate the tedious process of doing them. Using components pulled from dynamical systems, formal language theory, probability theory, expect systems, fractals, and other fun areas, we’ll look at both how to mimick styles of compositions written by actual humans, and how to push the avant-garde forward to new areas of tonal exploration and/or atonal un-listen-ability.