Modelling Emergence in an Interactive Music System

This paper presents work in progress on the generation and cognition of emergent structure in interactive music systems. It is suggested that the affordance and perception of emergence are central to musical experience._ We propose an account of the multi-levelled, dynamically parallel nature of musical activity, and describe a system for interacting directly with this aspect of musical production. Various models of computational emergence are discussed in terms of their descriptions and redescriptions of the musical behaviour of a complex adaptive system.