Biography
Education
In the early 1990s, Miranda attended the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS) in Brazil where he received a degree in Data Processing Technology in 1985. Miranda then attended the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) where he studied music composition. Desiring to learn more about music technology and experience more of the world, Miranda made his way to the United Kingdom, where he started his post-graduate research studies at the University of York. At York, he developed an in-depth study into musical composition using cellular automata. In 1991, he received his MSc in Music Technology from York. After receiving his MSc, Miranda went briefly to Germany to study algorithmic composition at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe.
In 1992, Miranda gained admittance to the Faculty of Music of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he obtained his PhD in the combined fields of music and artificial intelligence in 1995. For his doctoral thesis, he focused on musical knowledge representation, machine learning of music and software sound synthesis.
Experiences
After receiving his PhD, Miranda worked at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). At EPCC, he developed Chaosynth, an innovative granular synthesis software that uses cellular automata to generate complex sound spectra. [3]
In the mid-1990s, Miranda joined the Department of Music at the University of Glasgow, where he lectured music technology and electroacoustic music composition for a number of years. Then he moved to Paris, to take up a research position at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in the late 1990s.
At Sony, Miranda conducted research aimed at gaining a better understanding of the fundamental cognitive mechanisms employed in sound-based communication systems. This research led Miranda to focus on the evolution of the human ability to speak and the role of our musical capacity in the development of spoken languages. While at Sony, Miranda filed patents in the field of speech processing and made scientific contributions in the fields of speech synthesis, evolutionary music (computational) and cognitive neural modeling.
In the early 2000s he was appointed Visiting Professor of Interactive Media Arts at MECAD (School of Media Arts and Design) in Barcelona and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at the American University of Paris.
In 2003 Miranda moved to the University of Plymouth in the UK where he presently is a full Professor in Computer Music and Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR). He is also an active associate member of the Computer Music Lab at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in his native town of Porto Alegre.
Musical compositions
Miranda's musical compositions have been broadcast and performed in a number of concerts and festivals worldwide, including the Festival Latino-Americano de Arte e Cultura (Brasília, 1987), the Encompor (Porto Alegre, 1988–89, 1995), the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (Minneapolis, 1993), the Festival Elektronischer Frühling (Vienna, 1993–94), and the Ciclo Acusmático (Bogotá, 1995). His music has won prizes and distinctions in Europe and South America, including awards at the Concours International de Musique Électroacoustique de Bourges (1994), the Concurso de Composição de Londrina (Brazil, 1995) and the Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo di Musica Elettroacustica (Italy, 1995, 1998). [4] [5] [6] [7] A review of his latest solo CD Mother Tongue, in The Wire magazine, reads, "These are immensely sophisticated pieces that constitute an electronic global music of convincingly organic simplicity."
Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and application of new and existing computer software technologies and basic aspects of music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, electrical engineering, and psychoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origins of electronic music, and the first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century.
Digital music technology encompasses the use of digital instruments to produce, perform or record music. These instruments vary, including computers, electronic effects units, software, and digital audio equipment. Digital music technology is used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis and editing of music, by professions in all parts of the music industry.
Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale.
An electroencephalophone or encephalophone is an experimental musical instrument and diagnostic tool which uses brain waves to generate or modulate sounds.
Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music.
David Cope is an American author, composer, scientist, and Dickerson Emeriti Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. His primary area of research involves artificial intelligence and music; he writes programs and algorithms that can analyze existing music and create new compositions in the style of the original input music. He taught the groundbreaking summer workshop in Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music (WACM) that was open to the public as well as a general education course entitled Artificial Intelligence and Music for enrolled UCSC students. Cope is also co-founder and CTO Emeritus of Recombinant Inc., a music technology company.
Curtis Roads is an American composer, author and computer programmer. He composes electronic and electroacoustic music, specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis.
Horacio Vaggione is an Argentinian composer of electroacoustic and instrumental music who specializes in micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound and whose pieces are often scored for performers and computers.
Barry Truax is a Canadian composer who specializes in real-time implementations of granular synthesis, often of sampled sounds, and soundscapes.
Dimitri Voudouris, is an electroacoustic, new music composer, scientific researcher and pharmacist living in South Africa who pioneered UNYAZI, the first electronic music festival and symposium on the African continent in 2005 that took place at University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He lectures part-time at Witwatersrand University in electronic music composition.
Evolutionary music is the audio counterpart to evolutionary art, whereby algorithmic music is created using an evolutionary algorithm. The process begins with a population of individuals which by some means or other produce audio, which is either initialized randomly or based on human-generated music. Then through the repeated application of computational steps analogous to biological selection, recombination and mutation the aim is for the produced audio to become more musical. Evolutionary sound synthesis is a related technique for generating sounds or synthesizer instruments. Evolutionary music is typically generated using an interactive evolutionary algorithm where the fitness function is the user or audience, as it is difficult to capture the aesthetic qualities of music computationally. However, research into automated measures of musical quality is also active. Evolutionary computation techniques have also been applied to harmonization and accompaniment tasks. The most commonly used evolutionary computation techniques are genetic algorithms and genetic programming.
Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a Mexican composer and sound artist.
Computational creativity is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts.
Dr Peter John Bentley is a British author and computer scientist based at University College London.
Robert Scott Thompson is an American composer of ambient, instrumental and electroacoustic music. He earned the B.Mus. degree from the University of Oregon and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Diego. His primary teachers include Bernard Rands, Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa and F. Richard Moore. He creates work in a wide variety of forms ranging from chamber and orchestral music to works for the virtuoso soloist, computer music, and experimental video art.
Live electronic music is a form of music that can include traditional electronic sound-generating devices, modified electric musical instruments, hacked sound generating technologies, and computers. Initially the practice developed in reaction to sound-based composition for fixed media such as musique concrète, electronic music and early computer music. Musical improvisation often plays a large role in the performance of this music. The timbres of various sounds may be transformed extensively using devices such as amplifiers, filters, ring modulators and other forms of circuitry. Real-time generation and manipulation of audio using live coding is now commonplace.
Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition.
Concatenative synthesis is a technique for synthesising sounds by concatenating short samples of recorded sound. The duration of the units is not strictly defined and may vary according to the implementation, roughly in the range of 10 milliseconds up to 1 second. It is used in speech synthesis and music sound synthesis to generate user-specified sequences of sound from a database built from recordings of other sequences.
Gareth Loy is an American author, composer, musician and mathematician. Loy is the author of the two volume series about the intersection of music and mathematics titled Musimathics. Loy was an early practitioner of music synthesis at Stanford, and wrote the first software compiler for the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer. More recently, Loy has published the freeware music programming language Musimat, designed specifically for subjects covered in Musimathics, available as a free download. Although Musimathics was first published in 2006 and 2007, the series continues to evolve with updates by the author and publishers. The texts are being used in numerous mathematics and music classes at both the graduate and undergraduate level, with more current reviews noting that the originally targeted academic distribution is now reaching a much wider audience. Music synthesis pioneer Max Mathews stated that Loy's books are a "guided tour-de-force of the mathematics of physics and music... Loy has always been a brilliantly clear writer. In Musimathics, he is also an encyclopedic writer. He covers everything needed to understand existing music and musical instruments, or to create new music or new instruments. Loy's book and John R. Pierce's famous The Science of Musical Sound belong on everyone's bookshelf, and the rest of the shelf can be empty." John Chowning states, in regard to Nekyia and the Samson Box, "After completing the software, Loy composed Nekyia, a beautiful and powerful composition in four channels that fully exploited the capabilities of the Samson Box. As an integral part of the community, Loy has paid back many times over all that he learned, by conceiving the (Samson) system with maximal generality such that it could be used for research projects in psychoacoustics as well as for hundreds of compositions by a host of composers having diverse compositional strategies."
Marc Battier is a French composer and musicologist.
