At the end of the Workshop on Music and Artificial Life (Music-AL) held on Monday a group discussion illuminated a topic that I often find myself confronting when working with musical applications of the techniques of artificial life. As musicians and researchers, how and when do we classify our productions as art and when do we classify them as science. I often find in my personal productions that the line between artism and research if a thin one at best, with legitimate scientific questions spawning experimentations whose results are decidedly not science, and visa versa. I think that many who attended the workshop are of similar persuasion. This topic lends itself to a few question which perhaps we can elaborate on.
- Can we mix our research with artistic productions? And is this appropriate?
What comes to mind are areas such as computational biomusicology and simulation of the evolution of music which more often appear in music journals, though in some cases they may be real contributions to science. The corollary question is:
- If we are even attempting science, are we properly using the scientific method to answer questions, or are we just applying engineering techniques of classical computer science and artificial life to make something interesting?
- Is it appropriate to bend artistic works toward science? Or to pull science out of initially artistic pursuits?
It is not unheard of to re-appropriate aspects of work depending on the conference/publication/grant profile.
Of course, ALife in music is a broad topic with many interested parties producing varying degrees of art and science. I am most interested in the opinions of those who attended the workshop to express their thoughts on this in relation to their own work and to fill in parts of this topic I may have missed or neglected.
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