When
Thematic Session 4: Creativity and Expressivity (Tuesday, 11:05)
Abstract
A discussion on composer’s instincts is often difficult to frame because every composer composes differently depending on their background in terms of culture, education, genre, instrument, and method. One exception of such is found in Fred Lerdahl’s 1988 article titled ‘Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems’. The article explains composer’s instincts as a compositional grammar which can be informed by a listening grammar of how listeners listen. The result is a list of 17 ‘cognitive constraints’ that describe how composers can build an artificial system while remaining intact with their instincts from the listening grammar. Although many musicologists are critical of this theory, and deservingly so, this presentation discusses a practical application of the model to reflect on Lerdahl’s description of composer’s instincts. An autonomous generative algorithm has been built to compose materials that perfectly follow all 17 constraints. As shown in the score examples, music written using Lerdahl’s compositional grammar is basic and can be described as uninteresting; akin to drawing a stick-figure on paper. The generated ‘stick-figure’ music is un-stylized on its own and the author felt it needed additional parametrical changes to function as a piece of music. Since the constraints are stylistically ambiguous, there is potential for other composers to mould the materials into totally different styles and genres. In conclusion, we found that Lerdahl’s cognitive constraints are too ambiguous to function as a recipe for composition. But because of this ambiguity, composers are given the chance to work with un-stylized music in a way that makes explicit use of a human composer’s instincts. In this case, this process has helped the author identify and track his own preference for non-pitch and rhythm decisions made based on his instincts.
Bio
Kenrick is a composer-researcher based in Leeds, UK. His practice-led thesis, supervised by Martin Iddon and Freya Bailes, studies practical applications of cognitive models from music psychology into compositional methods. He is currently at the third year of his PhD, and is expecting to finish by September 2023.