Evaluating an improvising computer-implementation as a partial creativity in a music performance system

Abstract

analyse two specific cases of “improvising” music systems with the aim of developing some insights into what might constitute the “computational creativity” in each of these two implementations. First, I outline my working understandings of computational creativity and improvisation, giving a formal framework with which I subsequently examine my analyses of the two computer implementations: George E. Lewis’s Voyager and my own Favola. I complement the formal framework with soft systems analysis in order to map the role of the implementations in the concert performance situations. Through this approach I evaluate each of these implementations as a partial creativity in the context of the “human activity system” of the performance situation.