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Mozart Reloaded (a composition commissioned and performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, broadcast by BBC Radio 3, and published as a limited edition by Sargasso)

This composition, which researched the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and music-making, was commissioned by the BBC Concert Orchestra & BBC Radio 3 and featured in The Genius of Mozart season (2011). Premiered at the Banff Centre, Canada (21 October 2010) prior to this broadcast, it has had six subsequent live performances including at Escola de Comunicacoes e Artes, Sao Paulo (2010); Happening Festival of New Music and Media 2011, Calgary; EarZoom Festival, Ljublijana (2011); and New Resonances Festival, London (2012). Sargasso published the score, CD and accompanying monograph as a limited edition (2011).

An electroacoustic piano quintet in three movements, Mozart Reloaded responded to two main research questions:

1) How might musical creativity be modelled as Darwinian-like evolutionary processes? In “Emergent Songs by Social Robots” (2008) and “Artificial Evolution of Expressive Performance of Music” (2010), Miranda and colleagues describe their development of a model whereby software-agents evolve proto-musical repertoires by imitating each other. As they interact through long periods of time, modifications occur in their repertoires, as if they are evolving musical styles. Miranda thus designed a system for interactive composition, which embeds the notion that musical memes, or units, evolve as they form musical streams during imitations.

2) How might these imitative-evolutionary models inform compositional practice? For Mozart Reloaded, Miranda devised a method in which Mozart sonatas were segmented into memes, which could be traced in the music of other composers such as Gluck, Beethoven and JS Bach. He then replaced the original Mozart-memes with identical ones found in pieces by other composers, as if he were manipulating an evolutionary cultural process that has already taken place. Mozart Reloaded thereby tests and disseminates a compositional model through the creative processes of matching and recombining memes into new sequences, making evident how composers evolve individual styles through imitation.