NetWorks 3: Thresholds

by Shawn Bell

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Unfamiliar Order, NetWorks X: Momento Moirai, NetWorks 9: Somnia vana, NetWorks 8: Other Times, NetWorks 7: Canticle of Creatures, NetWorks 6: Music From a Farther Room, NetWorks 5: In Silico, NetWorks 4: Planet of Lost B-Movie Soundtracks and Other Anomalies, and 3 more. , and , .

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1.	Mindless 07:36	info	buy track
2.	Rivulets of Water and Light 04:48	info	buy track
3.	Spindrift I 09:48	info	buy track
4.	Deviations from the Average IV 08:37	info	buy track
5.	No Shortcut 08:30	info	buy track
6.	Machination 06:38	info	buy track
7.	Day of Rain 08:04	info	buy track
8.	Dreamcatcher 07:43	info	buy track
9.	No last Word 08:05	info	buy track
10.	Spindrift II 10:01	info	buy track
11.	Interplay 07:13	info	buy track

about

NetWorks is a music-generating program and a body of musical work. It is based on artificial-life, complex systems research and the Honing Theory of creativity (Gabora 2010). 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.” (Gabora 2006).

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.

credits

released November 22, 2016

Shawn Bell: Programmer, Composer, Mixing & Mastering. Album artwork evolved using SBart4 by Unemi Tatsuo.

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Shawn Bell Quebec, Québec

Educator, composer and interactive media artist dedicated to creativity and 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, computation arts and game design. ... more

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