Brain - Time - Music - Computing

The next 5 posts are excerpts from a chapter, titled "Time and Perception in Music and Computation," which appears in the book New Computational Paradigms for Computer Music, pp.125-146.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines music as “the art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, expressive content, etc.” Composers and performers of music invent and produce sounds, carefully organized with the intent and purpose to trigger emotional responses from the listeners, usually humans. Creating music therefore involves deep understanding and mastery, whether intuitive of explicit, of the human auditory perceptual and cognitive apparatus.

A reflexion on the nature of the phenomena involved points towards the ability of the mind to move in and out of flows of time, real or imaginary, as a defining feature of perceptual and cognitive activities. A comprehensive computational paradigm for computer music must afford the modeling of this ability.

Part 1: Middle World
Part 2: The Brain in Middle World
Part 3: Time and Perception
Part 4: Time and the Brain
Part 5: Time in Computation

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