Navigating Evolving Music

Client: Ewan Campbell <eahc2@cam.ac.uk>

Cambridge composer Ewan Campbell creates cartographic scores where the musical notes are curved and rendered over maps or other pictorial representations of nature. His next project is to use the evolution of musical ideas to reflect the processes of zoological development and mass extinctions. The arboreal subdivision of evolutionary trees very quickly renders traditional notational formats impractical for displaying the array of musical path options available for the performers. Your task will be to create a real-time continuously animating programme that is able to be run simultaneously by several different aligned performers, offering them live musical options, whilst allowing them to control their pathway. Your software will have an initial array of musical fragments to work with, but will also need to be able to accommodate new pieces written to use the software, and subsequently presented in live performances at the Cambridge Festival, where a new nature-based work by Ewan is being commissioned.