Fractal of Periodic Musical Elements: a re-taxonomy of music for machine learning
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adam Łukawski
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The study presents a taxonomy of periodic musical progressions inspired by the properties of Shepard tones, designed for training machine learning models. It is a system, implemented in new computer software, for the synthesis and analysis of music harmony, rhythm, and dynamics in an algorithmic context. In the introduction, motivation is explained for the creation of a new music taxonomy designed for future use with machine learning. In the main part of the text, a new music notation is introduced that enables the representation of any progression of harmony, rhythm, and dynamics in a form of multidimensional arrays. Furthermore, a new taxonomy of Shepard-tone-inspired "Periodic Musical Elements" is introduced and a new method for analysis of musical material is presented together with examples. The paper discusses the benefits of using this method in the perspective of further research connected to algorithmic music composition with machine learning.
Music NFTs: Blockchain for Artistic Research?
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Paulo de Assis, Paolo Giudici, Adam Łukawski
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the last few years museums and art galleries, as well as a growing number of artists embraced Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as a new digital mode of exposing, producing, and distributing art. Based upon digitised assets, NFTs are embedded in blockchains: decentralised networks of information exchange on which different kinds of data can be stored without a centralised controlling entity. While commonly associated with cryptocurrencies and financial ledgers of transactions, blockchain technology can support many other types of data (including visual, audio, and video files). For the arts, blockchain might bring radical changes to the ways in which art is generated, communicated, disseminated, and transacted. Despite its vertiginous expansion, the blockchain revolution is happening under the radar of many people and institutions.
With this seminar, the research group MetamusicX (at Orpheus Institute) launched research on NFTs in relation to artistic research. The seminar aimed at mapping the field, exploring the potential of blockchain for music creation, and launching the basis for a blockchain network at the service of artistic research.
Conference: Decentralised Creativity and Agential Systems in Music (Schedule)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adam Łukawski, Paulo de Assis, Martin Zeilinger
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This conference will explore how emerging technologies—especially generative AI and blockchain—reimagine the current notions of creative agency. Conveners: Adam Łukawski, Martin Zeilinger
Artificial intelligence (AI), with its learning algorithms operating at scale, can mimic human creative agency, and blockchain technologies, through smart contracts, can augment works of art with more or less autonomous behaviours that correspond to the agency of human participants in socio-economic interactions. While such developments can destabilise traditional notions of ownership, provenance, and agency in musical practices, they can also empower artists. Those working creatively with sound and music are today increasingly becoming system-builders and curators of musical ecosystems, turning their focus from the creation of singular, standalone musical works (in any traditional sense of the term) to the design of systems capable of generating artworks. This suggests an evolving role of music-producing systems today: from fixed intellectual constructs and creative expressions to dynamic, more-than-human technological networks that not only actively participate in the production of artworks with increasing levels of agency, but which can themselves be considered as artworks that constitute generative, expressive assemblages. This shift is further emphasised in distributed contexts, where varying levels of automation blur the boundaries between human and non-human contributions, creating environments where agency is negotiated and shared across diverse actants.
