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Minds and Machines

, Volume 20, Issue 4, pp 503–532 | Cite as

Unifying Conceptual Spaces: Concept Formation in Musical Creative Systems

  • Jamie Forth
  • Geraint A. Wiggins
  • Alex McLean
Article
First Online:
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Abstract

We examine Gärdenfors’ theory of conceptual spaces, a geometrical form of knowledge representation (Conceptual spaces: The geometry of thought, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000), in the context of the general Creative Systems Framework introduced by Wiggins (J Knowl Based Syst 19(7):449–458, 2006a; New Generation Comput 24(3):209–222, 2006b). Gärdenfors’ theory offers a way of bridging the traditional divide between symbolic and sub-symbolic representations, as well as the gap between representational formalism and meaning as perceived by human minds. We discuss how both these qualities may be advantageous from the point of view of artificial creative systems. We take music as our example domain, and discuss how a range of musical qualities may be instantiated as conceptual spaces, and present a detailed conceptual space formalisation of musical metre.

Keywords

Conceptual spaces Creativity Search Geometry Musical rhythm Similarity 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our colleagues in the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems group at Goldsmiths, and the computational creativity community at large, for many years of richly fruitful discussion. We also thank several anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on earlier drafts. The work reported here was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Studentship awarded to the first author and an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council DTA Doctoral Studentship awarded to the third author.

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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Computing & Centre for Cognition, Computation and CultureGoldsmiths, University of LondonLondonUK

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