nice organized soundtemporarypatterns bringing `new `mystery , thanks for the guiding text

Deviations From The Average IV is the 4th track from NetWorks 3: Thresholds, the entire album can be heard on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. or purchased on Bandcamp: shawnbell.bandcamp.com/album/networks-3-thresholds.

NetWorks is a music-generating (MIDI-data-generating) program and a body of work based on artificial-life, complex adaptive systems research and the Honing Theory of creativity. NetWorks uses a hierarchical, scale-free network to generate music that can range from orderly to chaotic. At the ‘edge of chaos’ it generates patterns that exhibit emergent complexity through coherent musical development at low, mid and high levels of musical organization, and often suggests a sense of direction through goal seeking behaviours.

Emergence, in the NetWorks program, is achieved, not through Darwinian evolutionary processes, but through a far older form of evolution called communal exchange. “There is extensive evidence that for the first several million years of its existence life on earth evolved through communal exchange of components amongst self-organizing autocatalytic protocells, prior to establishment of a genetic code, and only once a RNA-based self-assembly code was in place did life evolve through natural selection. … the last century’s emphasis on natural selection in evolutionary theory is not warranted by current research; even today, variation-selection is, quantitatively at least, not the dominant evolutionary process.” (L. Gabora, in press).

There are no selective processes (fitness functions) within NetWorks, so if an output stream is perceived to “evolve” it can then be said to originate solely through communal exchange.

Selective processes occur only between the interaction of the musician-programmer and the NetWorks program, when the musician-programmer (1) generates and evaluates network architectures, rule-sets and mappings, (2) orchestrates, mixes, and masters the most aesthetically pleasing instances of these outputs and (3) tweaks and expands the program itself.

In general, the sounds chosen to manifest the musical patterns discovered by the network attempt to reflect the mystery and wonder that virtually unlimited diversity can come from such simple interactive models. When mapping patterns to sound, an effort is made to preserve the integrity of the patterns rather than obfuscate them with complex synthetic textures or other effects that are readily available during mixing.

Since the MIDI data of NetWorks is computer-generated, sampled acoustic instruments are often used to give the music a “human feel”, and to allow the listener to relate and compare the self-organizing patterns to known genres.

Headphone listening is recommended.

This was a preliminary mix. The final mix is available on Bandcamp: https://shawnbell.bandcamp.com/album/networks-3-thresholds

Album artwork evolved using SBart4 by Unemi Tatsuo.

NetWorks 3: Thresholds

Deviations From The Average IV

Composer, educator and interactive media artist and professional dedicated to creativity and multidisciplinary collaboration. Interested in constructionist approaches to new media education and how interactive technologies and complexity theory enhance and expand the creative process in the traditional arts, new media and game design.

Developed NetWorks, a body of musical work as well as an interactive music-generating algorithm based on scale-free networks. Developer of ~zomes, a sound synthesizer based on a-life models. 

Interest in metacreation dates back to Voices From The Edge of Chaos (1998), a CD of emergent, self–organizing computer music. Received a FACTOR international distribution grant and was subsequently awarded a residency at Lovebytes Labs in Sheffield, England (1999), to produce a piece for Digital Space CD and CD ROM of “innovative new work using digital sound and multimedia”.

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Paul H Williams

"xavier gavin"

henry koek

AK Rockefeller

numbers in the dream