NetWorks 6: Music From a Farther Room

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.	A Thousand Small Deliberations 05:55		buy track
2.	Until Light is Reached 06:43	info	buy track
3.	Fracas 06:44	info	buy track
4.	Frank's Diversions 05:05	info	buy track
5.	Pathways 08:14	info	buy track
6.	Sanctuary 05:32	info	buy track
7.	Counterpointless 07:26	info	buy track
8.	Io Saturnalia 07:48	info	buy track
9.	Procession 02:55	info	buy track
10.	Search 04:59	info	buy track
11.	Morning Sky 06:04	info	buy track
12.	Open World 03:54	info	buy track

about

NetWorks is a music-generating system and a body of work based on Network theory, Complex Systems Science 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 a network attempt to reflect the mystery and wonder that virtually unlimited diversity can come from such simple models of complexity. When mapping patterns to sound, every 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.

credits

released January 11, 2019

Shawn Bell: Composer-programmer, mixing & mastering. Album photo by Shawn Bell.

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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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