Denis Baggi

Computer Generated Music and the Activity of the

New Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society

Abstract

The Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music is a new group within the IEEE CS Society, dedicated to computer applications to music and musicology. This lecture and text describe the recent activities of the Technical Committee, in particular some research projects, the results of which have been published by the IEEE CS Press in written form and on an audio Compact Disk and Cassette.

Introduction

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is the largest professional society dedicated world-wide to the advancement of electrical engineering and Computer Science, with over 300.000 members. The Computer Society (CS), with over 100.000 members, focuses on Computer Science and is responsible for the publication of the most highly regarded academic journals, research transactions and conference proceedings.

The IEEE CS has recently supported the founding of a Technical Committee (TC) on Computer Generated Music (CGM). Defined as the vast area that stretches between artistic music composed or played with computers at one end and audio signal processing at the other - without excluding the extremes -, CGM contains many aspects of electronic and computer engineering which, as the IEEE CS has recognized, are increasingly acquiring importance in science and technology - not to mention music itself. Computer Science, for example, has recognized for years the broader implications of its results in other disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and neurophysiology. Music is possibly the best example of a discipline that deals mostly with qualitative, rather than quantitative, issues, and has therefore more and more appeal for those computer scientists which work at the last frontiers of the field, dealing with common sense, inductive reasoning and intuition.

The TC on CGM shares common goals with all Technical Committees in the Computer Society, namely, activities for the practitioner and the researcher in the field, in the form of: publications, conferences, special sections in existing IEEE CS magazines and transactions. In addition, since CGM is not yet a universally accepted teaching and research topic within existing academic institutions and research laboratories, it is considering the publication of textbooks (with associated Compact Disks with related audio material), of interactive, multi-medial CD's (with hypertext,