A Cocreative Computational Approach to Musical Analogy

Abstract

Analogy is a critical cognitive process, at the core of the multiple ways in which we think in and through music. With structure-mapping theory as a point of departure, I describe how a computational implementation of its theoretical tenets may frame an approach to musical analogy which, in a cross-domain or music-to-music generative setup, would amount to a novel variation of concatenative synthesis, but driven preferably by higher-order relational structures instead of by the mere similarity of feature vectors.