The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project, entailing a technology based on chaotic system variability, is its ability to alter and enhance how people interact with music on and off line. By acting as a musical change agent, the proposed technology takes "personalized music" beyond playlists and song suggestions. For the first time, music listeners can bring their own creativity to the songs they care about. This project introduces a new paradigm for music where songs evolve and undergo transformation alone or with other songs, at the click of a button. The choice of music as an application for the technology is deliberate. Music is a highly context-dependent application where each note or musical event is determined by the preceding notes and events, and each note or event foreshadows those yet to come. That this advanced technique produces musical variations that can be analyzed as well as used for musical means suggest that the methodology could be applied to other sequences of context-dependent symbols, such as those that define image, text, film, and video. Furthermore, it can serve as an idea generator for media practitioners in general, as well as stimulate interest in engineering for students K-12 and beyond by linking science with the musical arts.
This I-Corps project harnesses chaotic system variability to generate variations of a sequence of context-dependent symbols, such those that constitute a musical work. Most engineers seek ways to eliminate chaotic behavior. Yet in its "chaotic regime", a dissipative chaotic system possesses a natural mechanism for variability due to the sensitivity of its solutions to initial conditions. This built-in variability can be exploited by a chaotic mapping technique that transforms an ordered input into a variant ordered output. The variant output can be close to the original work, it can mutate beyond recognition, as well as achieve degrees of variability in between these two extremes. The method includes parsing the input into an ordered sequence of original elements {Ni}, the original elements sequentially indexed by successive integer values i=1,....,imax. For each "i", a selection algorithm determines whether Ni is a candidate for modification or replacement, thus becoming a "receptor element". A substitution or modifying algorithm then operates on at least one of the receptor elements by varying or replacing it with a substitution element. The resulting ordered set of original and substituted or modified elements comprises the variant output. A virtually infinite set of variations is possible, each unique.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
