Christoph Finkensiep

This course addresses recent cognitive perspectives on music as a social, acoustical, psychological and cultural phenomenon.

This course gives an introduction to music generation with computational methods. The course starts with the preconditions and foundations of music generation, such as the principles of computation and computational representations of musical objects. We then proceed to cover a range of approaches to generating music artificially, including historic and current ideas with a broad range of methods. The technical aspects of these approaches will then be related to topics such aesthetics and creativity.

In the last two decades an important shift has occurred in music research, that is, from music as an art (or art object) to music as a process in which the performer, the listener, and music as sound play a central role. This transformation is most notable in the field of systematic musicology, which developed from “a mere extension of musicology” into a “complete reorientation of the discipline to fundamental questions which are non-historical in nature, [encompassing] research into the nature and properties of music as an acoustical, psychological and cognitive phenomenon” (Duckles & Pasler, 2001; Honing, 2006). These recent strands of music research will be interpreted in the context of the “cognitive revolution” in the humanities and the sciences. Next to an overview of the methods and techniques that became central to the contemporary musicologist’s toolkit, current developments will be discussed that explore what cognitive musicology can say about how music works.