Juan Sebastián Vassallo

Within my artistic research, composing is mediated by computational processes. I explore the possibilities that bring the use of computer-assisted tools as creative methods that have the potential to expand a composer´s creative process and open the door for the exploration and discovery of new relations between the conceptual, material, and formal dimensions of a musical work. These methods allow me to define new complex heuristics that contribute to an effective search for novel possibilities of analysis and organization of symbolic musical information, such as pitch, duration, dynamics, and also timbral and material dimensions of sound. I also interesting in reflecting about the agency of those computational processes in the final outcome that is finally performed as a music piece.

My project is organized as a two-folded investigation. On one hand, an artistic research part that is oriented to the composition of a corpus of contemporary experimental score-based music pieces, where I aim to portray the motivations and deeper reflections on my musical thinking and how this is expanded by the computational agency. On the other hand, I am interested in the study of human creativity from a scientific perspective, and I believe that it is possible to better understand human creativity by means of methods and concepts coming from the discipline of artificial intelligence, as it has been proposed by many thinkers, particularly Margareth Boden and Geraint Wiggins.

I carry out an empirical study aimed at gaining further understanding of the underlying cognitive processes for music composition. I investigate how creative behaviors manifest themselves as models of thinking and interplay in the process of compositional problem-solving and decision-making, from the germinal ideas to the formal determination and further elaboration of material and structure, seeking aesthetic congruence within an individual piece or a composition´s language.