Handle: Engineering Artificial Musical Creativity at the “Trickery” Level - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 298

14.6 Concluding Remarks

We suspect that some learned readers of a theoretical bent will be at least somewhat
disppointed that we haven't engaged foundational questions regarding the nature of
music, and that we therefore have taken no positions on such questions. Instead, yes,
we have reported on our goal to mechanize “middle-standard” creativity in the realm
of music. Nonetheless, our commitment to the music calculus, truth be told, does
in fact reflect some rather deep positions (on the part, at least, of Bringsjord), ones
affirmed in the context of the excellent work of relevant theoreticians. We end by
encapsulating two such positions here.
One: Those familiar with Occidental music know that it is clearly sometimes
propositional in nature. Handel (not Handle) clearly intended to at a minimum bol-
ster belief, in his audience, in certain propositions, via Messiah . And there are count-
less other such examples. But must music be propositional in nature? As Cross [ 13 ]
eloquently points out, No. Music can be participatory and interactive, with the declar-
ative dimension eliminated, or at least allowed to approach zero. In this context, it's
important to realize that our

, despite the fact that it is a logical system, is quite
well-suited to modeling dynamic, multi-agent interaction in cases where the inter-
action in question is free of propositional content. To put the point starkly, the event
calculus within the music calculus can be used to model information flow that is
entirely non-semantic and inanimate.
Second position: There are other formal frameworks, if not outright formal theo-
ries, designed to capture large parts of music and music cognition. Above, we cited,
and briefly discussed [ 26 ], but of note also is the framework of Murray-Rust &Smaill
[ 19 ], the framework provided by Allwood et al. [ 1 ], and the insightful modification
of Allwood et al.'s framework carried out by Cross [ 13 ]. Our music calculus, in
this context, has a distinguishing mark, one that we seek to refine and enhance into
the future: viz.,

M

promotes the explicit representation and reasoning of iterated
doxastic attitudes (and, for that matter, other intensional attitudes) to the level of
full explicitness. Creative human conductors, jazz muscicians, and film composers
all, we believe, are truly creative only when they premeditatedly reason, and indeed
reason well, over the beliefs that they have about the beliefs that listeners/viewers
are likely to have when these listeners/viewers experience the music in question.
Accordingly, unlike other frameworks, ours allows for formulae in which explicit
and iterated intensional operators are allowed.

M

Acknowledgments This project is made possible by generous sponsorship from both the NSF
(grant no. 1002851, to Braasch, Bringsjord, and Oliveros), and the John Templeton Foundation, to
Bringsjord and Govindarajulu. The authors would additionally like to thank the anonymous referees
of this paper for their insights.