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how to ascertain and characterise a musical direction, and which of many possi-
ble contributions might enhance the current musical mood? However an algorithm
specification does not necessarily require a top-down structure. Participatory activ-
ity should be recognisable both to human performers and listeners. The extent and
character of the participation might be evident in apparent types of behaviour (some
examples are discussed in Sect.
6.4.1
); musical processes that allude to social modes
of interaction. The wider challenges in achieving true human-machine participation
are explored in later in this chapter, from musical, social and cultural perspectives.
6.2.2.4 Leadership
Another attribute of an improvising musician is the capacity to undertake a direct
leadership role. In other words to attempt to change the musical direction, to invoke
a new musical centre. In improvised music such roles may be fuzzy and interchange-
able, and never explicitly agreed upon, but at any given time there is a balance to be
struck between responsiveness and proactive intervention.
6.2.3 Relationship of the Four Attributes to Creativity
Perhaps the most familiar model of a creative process is the “exploration of a con-
ceptual space”, i.e. explorative behaviour within constraints, whether explicitly de-
fined or not. In freely improvised group performance, it is characteristic for timbral,
textural and gestural events, however individually novel, to be consistent with a
shared, emerging aesthetic. This could be viewed as a participatory exploration of
a musical space. In algorithmic terms, an iteration through a set of parameters or
the navigation of system state to distant areas of state space can be viewed as an
exploration of the potentialities of the formal computer code.
Boden's most demanding level of creativity is the notion of a transformation
of conceptual space itself (Boden
2004
). It is very challenging to think of any al-
gorithmic process that could produce brand new interpretations of its own output.
However, the ability to intervene proactively seems a necessary pre-condition of
transformational creativity. We believe that live algorithmic music in which leader-
ship from any party is possible offers such a prospect, i.e. to change our expectations
about how humans and machines can engage in collective performance, and the con-
sequent nature of the creative outcomes. Collective improvisation already offers a
powerful approach to transformational creativity, in that the group does not possess
a single shared conceptual space but a set of distinct individual conceptualisations
interacting in a shared creative activity: different participants can influence these
collaborators. Individual understanding of the music is a continually evolving inter-
action.
