Giuliano Lombardo Accademia di Belle Arti di Sassari giuliano@keybit.net ALGORITHMIC COMPOSITION AND AUTOMATIC CREATIVITY.

Abstract A procedure presented in my article "Factors of Abnormality and Disturbance" describing a mechanical method for creating new text via a series of automatic translations is discussed. Similarities and differences with human creative processing are considered, as well as the point of view of the end reader of the final text. This perspective suggests that the process of serial automatic translation is able to generate language that alters the rules of its own structure. 1 Relationship between art and algorithms. Can algorithms be used by the artist as an instrument of self-criticism and openness to different interpretations? It appears that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, finding himself submerged by requests for sheet music to be performed in dance halls, developed a system for composing this kind of music by throwing dice. A guidebook that enabled people to compose waltzes and similar dance music was published right after Mozart's death and bore his signature. The system featured in Mozart's automatic composition handbook used a series of basic modules consisting of a few bars of written music. The dice were used to determine the combinations of these basic modules. In the same period many similar publications came out, all of them describing sets of simple rules to compose music without knowing the rules of musical composition. These systems were based on simple combinatory algorithms that made many millions of combinations possible without repetition (Prieberg, 1963). Today the word algorithm is immediately associated with computer science but the term was introduced in the IXth century by the founder of modern mathematcs al-Huwarizmi. Scientists have studied many different ways of formalizing algorithms. Before computers came into existence one can remember the work done on this subject by David Hilbert (Hilbert, 1933), Alonzo Church (Church, 1936), GdelHerbrandKleene (Bezem et. al. 2003) and Alan Turing (Hodges, 1992). In recent years, two new approaches have been developed, that of artificial intelligence which aims at creating programs that are able to learn, and that of genetic programming, which uses concepts of Darwinian evolution. Here I will define an algorithm as a well defined formal procedure used to solve a problem or complete a task The use of algorithms in artistic and architectural production has been a recurring theme in the history of humanity. It can be traced back to ancient Egyptian art and the art of the classical era, in which rules and canons defined artistic production. The idea that there had to be a set of rules behind the phenomenon of reality brought Pythagoras to formulate the basic rules of musical harmony and in this field we can find many examples of

automatic composition. By automatic composition I intend the formalization of a procedure that generates a composition without the intervention of the author other than that of definining the initial set of rules. The first composition that follows this definition may be that of the medieval composer Guido, a monk from the Arezzo area. Known as the inventor of modern musical notation, Guido d'Arezzo proposed a procedure that involved the association of a certain note with each vowel in the holy scripture, therefore obtaining a musical version of the text (Guido d'Arezzo, 1026). Since then, the elaboration of mechanical and repeatable procedures that are able to generate musical compositions has fascinated composers throughout the world. The XX century witnessed great development in these methods, from John Cage's use of the I-Ching (Cage, 1961) to Jannis Xenakis's Stochastic Music (Xenakis, 1992), from Zyklus fr einen Schlagzeuger by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Stockhausen, 1989) to Brian Eno's Generative Music (Eno, 1996) just to quote a few. Algorithmic composition has been especially developed by composers but similar procedures have been applied in every art form. Automated generative methods can be found in literature, architecture and in visual art forms. OULIPO, for example, was founded by the writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician Francois de Lionnais. The reason for this institution is clear if we just consider its name, which is an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Laboratory for Potential Literature). During this experience Queneau wrote a book of sonnets in which the basic parts could be combined in a hundred thousand billion ways (Queneau, 1961). The author achieved this by using a similar method to the one used by Mozart for his automated waltzes. Many Dada and Surrealist artists dedicated their work to the development of automatic procedures attempting to free the artwork from the conscious control of the artist. Surrealists mainly employed methods derived from automatic writing, automatic drawing and free association techniques that were meant to produce art through the artist's unconscious. These techniques were aimed at bypassing conscious intervention but did not investigate the mechanisms that underlie unconscious creativity. In the work of Minimalist and Conceptual artists, extreme importance is given to the mechanical execution of the work. For these artists the mechanical process is purely executive and is not intended for finding significant variations, so I believe it cannot be considered as part of the field of automatic creativity. Repeatability is part of the artwork, but it is not used as a means of generating new and significantly different outcomes. Nonetheless, in Sol Lewitt's series Wall Drawings, the precepts of Minimalism are combined with an algorithmic approach, opening the initial project to multiple variations and interpretations. A very different approach to generative algorithms is used in installations and interactive art. Here the artist defines an initial setting that is intended to be completed, in partially unpredictable ways, by the intervention of the public. Countless automatic generative procedures have been defined and used by artists in the Eventualist area, from Sergio Lombardo's Stochastic Painting to Giovanni Di Stefano's Blind Painting, from Anna

Homberg's Aleatopi to Piero Mottola's series Migliorare-Peggiorare (Ferraris, 2004). Whatever form these automatic, mechanical, algorithmical or aleatory compositions take, these methods are used to: (1) separate the creative process from that of the author; (2) extend the possibilities and potential of the work of art; (3) expand our knowledge about the creative process itself; (4) test a set of rules or a formal system. In order to avoid arbitrary intervention, these procedures include an element of chance. Some procedures use randomness as a way of choosing among a limited number of elements (however many). These methods are based on the combination of a predetermined set of elements. Others give chance greater importance and include random elements as a way of achieving indeterminable and non-linear outcomes. As Nassim Talb would say, the first group can be found in Mediocristan and the second in Extremistan (Taleb, 2007). In recent years, the application of artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms to automatic composition has introduced an important change, the possibility of the algorithm to change itself. That is, the possibility of the algorithm to change its own rules, to learn or to evolve with time. 2 Considerations about the application of a generative algorithm and evaluation of the possibility of a work of art to alter the rules of its own language. In the article "Factors of Abnormality and Disturbance" (Lombardo, 2006) I described the process of an algorithmic composition developed for creating a series of works. Here I will consider the first part of the project, where a new text is generated starting from any given text. The process consists of a series of repeated translations of a text from one language to another using translation software. Following, is an example of the work this algorithm does. In this case, the initial text is the definition of the word love from a Webster Pocket English Dictionary. The definition reads: Love is a constellation of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness.[1] The meaning of love varies relative to context. Romantic love is seen as an ineffable feeling of intense attraction shared in passionate or intimate attraction and intimate interpersonal and sexual relationships.[2] Though often linked to personal relations, love is often given a broader signification, a love of humanity, of nature, with life itself, or a oneness with the Universe, a universal love or karma. Love can also be construed as Platonic love,[3] religious love,[4] familial love, and, more casually, great affection for anything considered strongly pleasurable, desirable, or preferred, to include activities and foods.[5][2] This diverse range of meanings in the singular word love is often contrasted with the plurality of Greek words for love, reflecting the

concept's depth, versatility, and complexity. After the series of automatic translations, translating the text back to English returned the following text (I called it Love Drift): It loves the emotieconstellatie and it experienced relative of the normal love of the effort or the water concludes importance, [ injector to the left of emendation of the thing, is what correlation it felt well, ]. Between him he was frequent to sufficiently and the annexes of La Paz, epektame ' this place that is much quality, ' or gave to the importance of mensdom individual, in romantico and if like his this aresti of the automobile of the relation of the source with the house that it causes or the love of the qualities of thol of lik of kyo of which he him the standard he will be frequent and we it will be connected, later the package where the reason of the secret with interpersoonlijk 1 of the friend of the relation beyond the limits or solicits and or what khay amiably where by the relation it will pay he will be the crust of strength and [ is justifiable the quality and perfection 2 will be direction, ] he does with enchantment of the love of enchantment of the respect to the expression of the thing in the private place? ; . Respect for judgment, due to communication to intention of project, in that it connects that it does not know, he internal crust of the propensity of vklyuayet one of the thought to arestw', to the family and to the indifference possibility 5 is many giantess of the annexes in 3 2 and [ ] [ ] [ ] and n, [ 4 things was, ], amors eysevoy of the love of this point of the love of the importance you you will approve, the work included/that understands the responsibility of the intensive aid in the place to descend, that learns the thing, amors or, field that the company of production will be safe. Respect first a piedino of the company, the depth of the package to that it takes care of sufficiently diverse frequently, plurale of the word of the painting can reason the double of the word of the fat in veelzijdigheid that makes to be complicated, his of bezinningsconcept that with one, he. Starting from a text in one language, let's say in English, the text is then translated into another language, randomly chosen, for example French. The process is then repeated, translating the new text into another randomly chosen language, so from French into Gaelic, from Gaelic into Chinese, then into Dutch, Spanish and so on. After a certain number of translations the text has completely changed and it is translated back into the initial language. The choice of the initial texts, the stimulus-texts, is based on two rules. The first is that the text should not be too simple as far as semantics and grammar. A sentence with a very simple grammar structure or meaning would have little ambiguity and it would reduce the error margin or the margin of interpretation of the translation. So the grammar must be

complex and/or the sentence must have words that are complex, ambiguous or specific to a certain culture. The second rule I followed was not to choose texts that had been written with an aesthetic, artistic or creative intent or that have been interpreted as such. Undoubtedly, the concept and project, as well as the stumuli-texts and the translation software were created by human intellect. Nonetheless, once the procedure was defined and the process begun further human intervention was avoided. The human creative element returns in the phase of fruition and when the reader tries to understand the final text. Language, as well as thought and music, is built on relations. Ideas, words and notes acquire their meaning when they are put in relation to one another. This is how new ideas, literary works and symphonies are created. Because of this important role played by context the general meaning of a sentence may be drastically altered by a slight change in meaning in the translation of a word. A word does not refer to a single idea, it acquires its meaning from the context in which it's used and this is exactly the weak spot of translation software programs. I found this to be a very useful feature for a generative algorithm. It is somewhat similar to the kind of connections our brain activates when daydreaming or just plain dreaming, when we allow ourselves to take into consideration farther and less likely connections and attenuate the control of our sense of reality. This is a way in which a translation of meaning maintains a link with the original words. What comes out is not a totally arbitrary text, although it may be very different from the original. The distance between the translated text and the original one keeps getting bigger and bigger each time the text is translated, until the two have very little or nothing in common. It must be said that the original intent was to use the automatic process, not to simulate human creativity, but to explore the possibilities of mechanical creativity in itself. The creative algorithm was intended to automatically create sentences that were different than those used and created by human beings. It may be that my own human nature inevitably brought me to reproduce a process of human creativity. If this is true, this algorithm might even shed some light on biological creative processes. Even though language and translation software have their history and memory, the end result is not influenced by emotions other than those of the reader. I later found several analogies between this algorithm and the hypotheses made on human creativity in the field of neuroscience (Andreason, 2005). The intention of this work was not to contribute to cognitive neuroscience studies of creativity. I thought the interpretation of the final text and the possibility of repeating the procedure with endless variations would be an interesting and personal experience for the participants. This algorithm subsitutes the first phase of the creative process, when connections between distant ideas are considered. The work then requires the second phase of the creative process, the selection and interpretation of these new connections, to be carried

out by the public. The public is given the task of reading the work, giving it its meaning. This is made possible by the ambiguity and absurdity of the random alterations in contrast with a plausible linguistic structure. Although he final text presents many random elements, its structure is quite different than that of mathematical random patterns like white noise or 1/f formulas. I try to avoid these kind of patterns because they tend to be too uniform and easily recognizable to arouse a real interest. The stochastic process I'm describing, without recurring to mathematical noise patterns, generates a nondeterministic output the meaning of which is not filtered by the authors mind,. Using random meaning alterations becomes an important part of this quest for novel and surprising solutions that are unknown even to the author. Author who then becomes himself part of the public. The problem of structure in algorithmic composition is that when the public understands it intrest is lost. Randomness alone arouses intrest when it first occurs, but it soon becomes repetitive. For this reason I'm interested in finding (simple) ways of creating complex structures that will make their reverse engineering more intresting for the public. Serial translation methods maintain linguistic patterns that are similar to those of human language but sometimes bend or contradict its rules without an immediately percievable regularity. In order to test the effect that the final text has on the reader, I wrote an email, containing a text that was created using this algorithm, to a group of people, asking them to indicate who, in their opinion, was the author of the text. According to the people who answered my email the author was a philosopher, a poet, somebody who could see beond simple perception, a mystic, a madman or a scientist. These are all figures who happen to have a creative approach to language. They use a certain language but they invent their own language at the same time. This is a characteristic of the extraordinary creativity found in some human beings (Andreason, 2005). More data must be acquired, but these first results suggest that text generated this way does not appear as a bunch of randomly generated words although they do not entirely follow the rules of language. The author seems to be aware of these rules and, nonetheless bends them, like a philosopher, a researcher, a poet or someone in an altrered state of consciousness does. In other terms, the algorithm generates a text that alters its own rules.

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"American Journal of Mathematics" n.58. Eno, Brian (1996) "Generative Music", in Motion Magazine, July 7. Ferraris, Paola (2004) "Psicologia e arte dell'evento. Storia Eventualista 1977-2003", Gangemi, Roma. Guido, d'Arezzo (1026) "Micrologus", IPMC, Paris, 1993. Hilbert, David (1933) "Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Erster Band: Zahlentheorie", American Mathematical Society, 1965. Hodges (1992) "Alan Turing: the Enigma" Random House, London. Lombardo, Giuliano (2006) "Factors of Abnormality and Disturbance", in "Rivista di Psicologia dell'Arte", Jartrakor, Roma. Prieberg, Fred K. (1963) "Musica ex Machina", Einaudi, Torino. Queneau, Raymond (1961) "Cent mille milliards de pomes", Gallimard, Paris. Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1989) "Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews." Marion Boyars, London and New York. Taleb, Nicholas N. (2007) "The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable", Penguin, 2008. Xenakis, Iannis (1992) "Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Music", Pendragon.