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Eduardo R. Miranda
"Mozart for a modern world" |
| Welcome to my blog-like webpage! I am a composer working at the crossroads of music and science. My music is informed and inspired by my research into Artificial Intelligence (AI) in significant ways. My repertoire includes music for symphonic orchestras, chamber groups, solo instruments - with and without live electronics - and electroacoustic music. My music has been broadcast and performed at festivals and concerts worldwide, by renowned performers and ensembles such as Ian Pace (piano), Frances M Lynch (soprano), Mariona Sagarra (soprano), Luciani Cardassi (piano), Catarina Domenici (piano), Ney Rosauro (percussion), Saltire String Quartet, Chamber Group of Scotland, Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO), Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre (OSPA), BBC Concert Orchestra, Heritage Orchestra and Ten Tors Orchestra, to cite but a few. In addition to concert music, I have composed for theatre and contemporary dance. Currently, I am a composer-in-residence at the Science Museum, London, working with Lottolab Studio, London. Click on the icons below for more information.   I have recently discussed my work on AI in music composition in The Forum - broadcast by BBC World Service - with BBC diplomatic correspondent, Bridget Kendall, UCL's cell therapy maverick, Prof Chris Mason, and MIT's economist, Prof Esther Duflo. A truly interdisciplinary discussion with examples from my symphonic work, Mind Pieces (see below). Click on the icon below for more information and to access the podcast.   Contact: mirandaagent@gmail.com SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS World Premiere of Die Lebensfreude in Cascais, Portugal. flute, clarinet, piano, violin, violoncello, electroacoustics (6 channels) and visual projection Die Lebensfreude was commissioned by Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble and is due to be premiered in Cascais, Portugal on 01 June 2012, conducted by Guillaume Bourgogne. The piece is inspired by a painting by Max Ernst, Die Lebensfreude (The Joy of Life), which is a twist on a painting by Matisse with the same name. In contrast to the joyous nature of Matisse’s painting, Ernst spreads entangled leaves and tendrils across the picture and populates it with praying mantises. At that time, when the ensemble commissioned the piece, I had started developing research into rendering the behaviour of an amoeba-like slime mould called Physarum polycephalum into sound. As this mould inhabits shady, cool, moist, shaded areas over decaying plant matter, I decided to draw from this research to compose this piece. The electroacoustics are sonifications of a computer simulation of the mould foraging for food. The instrumental part was generated by the same simulation, but I adapted the notes to fit my compositional aims. A visual animation of the simulation is displayed during the performance, but the images are twisted in real-time by the sounds from the instruments.   Sacra Conversazione orchestra, percussion and electroacoustics A few years ago John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York granted me a Fellowship in composition to conduct research into phonology, computational modelling of the human voice and evolution of music. One important outcome of this work is the piece Sacra Conversazione, for strings orchestra, percussion and electronics (and versions for other formations), in which surreal voices sing in a "global" synthesized language combining utterances from seventeen different languages from all over the world (German, Japanese, Hebrew, English, Spanish, Arabic, Persian and so on) and other "impossible" vocal sounds (e.g., by artificially enlarging the vocal tract to gigantic size). Click on the photo below to watch a QuickTime movie with excerpts from the premiere by Ten Tors Orchestra (Simon Ible, conductor) at the 2008 Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, in Plymouth.  Sacra Conversazione has recently been performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra (Charles Hazlewood, conductor) at the Sount Bank Centre, London, on 09 June 2011 as part of the Electronica III series presented by Jarvis Cocker.  An edited recording of the concert has been broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 3 July http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/ In the run-up for the concert, the journal Nature published a Q&A session by Philip Ball on the composition and what music can tell us about speech, physiology and cognition. (Click on the image below for a PDF copy.) A longer version of the interview is available from Philip's blog Homunculus.  Mind Pieces orchestra, percussion and prepared piano I have recently completed a new symphonic composition in five movements, called Mind Pieces, for prepared piano, orchestra and percussion, which was premiered by the Ten Tors Orchestra (Simon Ible, conductor) in February 2011, again at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival. Mind Pieces is inspired by the phenomenon of memory retrieval by the brain and how our memory frequently distorts information. This composition uses musical materials generated with A-life simulations (or Arti ficial Life), models of the way in which information travels through networks of neurons in the brain, bird songs, Villa Lobos-inspired rhythms and orchestration inspired by Holst’s Jupiter and Ravel's Bolero. Click on the photo below to watch a QuickTime movie with excerpts from the premiere. "The
basis for each movement was an “ear-worm”: a familiar fragment of
rhythm, melody or texture briefly recalled (we heard bits of
Villa-Lobos, Holst, Ravel) and then reprocessed into something else.
Behind the music lay some no doubt complex thinking about the tension
between the persistence and fallibility of memory. But as heard, it was
perfectly straightforward, tuneful, tonal, unexceptionably pleasing ..."
(Michael White,
The Telegraph)
 "...mix full of fascinating sonorities and timbres ..." (Philip Buttall, The Herald) Mozart Reloaded piano and electroacoustics Mozart Reloaded, is a piece for piano and electronics in 3 movements, which I composed for the BBC Concert Orchestra's Mozart Mash-up project, featured as part of BBC Radio 3's "The Genius of Mozart" season in January 2011. The piece is dedicated to pianist Luciane Cardassi, who premiered it at Banff Centre, Canada. (Go to the BBC CO website - link above - to listen to the piece.) Cardassi's recording, the score and an essay on the compositional process and thinking behind the piecehas just been released by Sargasso.  Waggle Dance string octet and the Soundwall I composed Waggle Dance for London's Science Museum. It was commissioned by Lottolab Studio and it was first performed by Heritage Orchestra (Anthony Weeden, conductor) during a Lates event, which took
place at the museum on 27 July 2011.
The piece is for string octet and the Soundwall. The Soundwall is an extraordinary immersive musical instrument which is being developed with Prof Beau Lotto, at Lottolab Studio. During the performance, the live sounds of the strings are relayed to the soundwall placed at a distance, creating a secondary performance/concert space. The audience can move from one space to another during the performance if they wish. The buzzing sounds of the strings dance on the wall like bees in search of pollen. Click on the photos below to watch a short documentary on the premiere.   Portrait @ Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival The 2012 edition of the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival offered an unprecedented opportunity to hear three compositions of mine, spanning a broad period of my career: from a very early piece for electric violin and electronics composed in the 1980s to the premiere of my latest composition for amplified strings and electric violin. Click on the photo below to watch a QuickTime movie with excerpts from Wee Batucada Scotica, a string quartet from the mid of the 1990s, performed here by the fanstastic Leo String Quartet from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. |
Impact: International Press
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My work has been reported by the
press worldwide. Below is a short selection of recent
news stories. Click on the covers of the magazines below to read the articles.
 
   
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Music"... a formidable electroacoustic composer"- Wire - |
Published scores
Discography Most of the CDs below can be bought online; e.g., via Amazon, Tesco, etc. If you happen to be in Berlin, you will find some of them for sale at Gelbe Musik, Schaperstr 11. If you are interested in a particular CD and you cannot find it in the market, please do not hesitate to contact me. Mother Tongue is also available from iTunes, where you may also purchase individual tracks: [iTunes]. Solo album release by Sargasso
 Pieces on this CD:
... These are immensely
sophisticated pieces that constitute an electronic global music of
convincingly organic simplicity. Brian Morton, Wire
... Clever, and strangely soothing, its sound blipped, splattered and dripped, ending in a scrunching cascade of high splintered sound. Mary Miller, The Scotsman New Release by Sargasso: Mozart Reloaded This special Sargasso Limited Edition of 100 signed copies includes a book, 2 CDs and an original print. The book contains an essay by about the compositional process involved in the creation of the piece, a foreword by Professor Andy Miah, and the full score of the piece. It also includes a unique signed print by Peter BB Davis, created especially for this edition.  Part
of CD compilations and CDs accompanying publications
       
Concerts Below is only a short list of representative concerts and festivals all over the world where my music has been performed .  
         
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Research"[Miranda's]
research into the evolution of music may change the way in which we
create music"
- New Electronics - |
| My research interests and
expertise include:
composition (including algorithmic, computer-aided and
electroacoustic), sound synthesis, new musical interfaces, expressive
music performance (by machines), brain-computer music interfacing,
evolutionary computer music, music neurotechnology, unconventional
computation (for music technology) and artificial intelligence. I am Professor of Computer Music with Plymouth University in England and I am affiliated to UFRGS's Computer Music Lab in Brazil. Also, I have been appointed DAAD Edgard-Varese-Gastprofessur at Technische Universität Berlin, and Research Fellow at the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung (Museum of Musical Instruments, Berlin Philharmonic). I am proud of the impact of my research into brain-computer music interfacing (or BCMI) for people with severe disabilities, which was the topic of a key note I gave at the international conference on "Music Technology: Solutions to Challenges", held recently at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, in London. Check the articles by Philip Ball in Nature  , by Matthew
Knight, in CNN Lab  and by Alice Vincent in Wired  . I
have recently won the 2011 Vice-Chancellor's World Class Research Award at Plymouth University for my "outstanding contribution to the
research and outward-facing agenda" of the institution.
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Editorial Boards
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Books |
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Hot off the press: JUST PUBLISHED!
 
 
[Click
here] for a review by Victor Lazzarini, National University of
Ireland Maynooth, in Computer Music
Journal.
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Edited thematic journal issues
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Research papers: journals"... author of one of the top 5% most highly cited papers in [his] field worldwide"- Council of Canadian Academies - |
| I have
published well over 100 refereed research papers in conference
proceedings, journals and book chapters. Only peer-reviewed research
papers published in learned journals
are listed below. A complete list of my research paper
publications is available on request. Miranda, E. R., Adamatzky, A. and Jones, J. (2011). "Sounds Synthesis with Slime Mould of Physarum Polycephalum", Journal of Bionic Engineering, 8(2011): 107-113. Anders, T. and Miranda, E. R. (2011). "A Computational Model for Rule-Based Microtonal Music Theories and Composition", Perspectives of New Music, 48(2): 47-77. Miranda, E. R., Magee, W., Wilson, J. J., Eaton, J., and Palaniappan, R. (2011). “Brain-Computer Music Interfacing (BCMI): From Basic Research to the Real World of Special Needs", Music and Medicine, DOI: 10.1177/1943862111399290 Anders, T. and Miranda, E. R. (2011). “A Survey of Constraint Programming Systems for Modelling Music Theories and Composition”, ACM Computing Surveys, 43(4):Article 30. Anders, T. and Miranda, E. R. (2010). “Constraint Application with Higher-Order Programming for Modeling Music Theories”, Computer Music Journal, 34(2):25-38. Miranda, E. R. (2010). "Contextualizing Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Through the Lenses of Contemporary Science", Physics of Life Reviews, 7:35-36. Miranda, E. R. (2010). “Plymouth brain-computer music interfacing project: from EEG audio mixers to composition informed by cognitive neuroscience”, International Journal of Arts and Technology, 3(2/3):154-176. Miranda, E. R. (2010). “Organised Sound, Mental Imageries and the Future of Music Technology: A Neuroscience Outlook”, Organised Sound 15(1):13-25. Miranda, E. R., Kirke, A., Zhang, Q. (2010). “Artificial Evolution of Expressive Performance of Music: An Imitative Multi-Agent Systems Approach”, Computer Music Journal, 34(1):80-96 Anders, T. and Miranda, E. R. (2009). “Interfacing Manual and Machine Composition”. Contemporary Music Review, 28(2):133-147. Durrant, D., Hardoon, D. R., Brechmann, A., Shawe-Taylor, J., Miranda, E. R. and Scheich, H. (2009). “GLM and SVM analyses of neural response to tonal and atonal stimuli: new techniques and a comparison”, Connection Science, 21(2-3):161-175. Kirke, A. and Miranda, E. R. (2009). "A Survey of Computer Systems for Expressive Music Performance", ACM Computing Surveys, 42(1):Article 3. Miranda, E. R., Bull, L., Gueguen, F. and Uroukov, I. S. (2009). "Computer Music Meets Unconventional Computing: Towards Sound Synthesis with In Vitro Neural Networks", Computer Music Journal, 33(1):09-18. Miranda, E. R. and Matthias, J. (2009). "Music Neurotechnology for Sound Synthesis", Leonardo, 42(5):439-442. Miranda, E. R. (2008). "Emergent Songs by Social Robots", Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 20(4):319-334. Miranda, E. R., and Maia Jr., A. (2007). "Spectral Fuzzy Sets and Markov Streaming for Granular Synthesis of Sound", Symmetry: Culture and Science, 18(2-3):223-241. Miranda, E R. (2006). “Brain-computer music interface for composition and performance”, International Journal on Disability and Human Development, 5(2):119-125. Miranda, E. R. (2005). “Artificial Phonology: On Synthesising Disenbodied Humanoid Voice for Composing Music with Surreal Languages”, Leonardo Music Journal, 15:8-16. Miranda, E. R. and Brouse, A. (2005). “On Interfacing the Brain Directly with Musical Systems”, Leonardo, 38(4):331-336. Miranda, E. R. and Valsamakis, N. (2005). “Iterative Sound Synthesis using Cross-Coupled Digital Oscillators”, Digital Creativity, 16(2):79-92. Miranda, E. R. (2004). “At the Crossroads of Evolutionary Computation and Music: Self-Programming Synthesizers, Swarm Orchestras and the Origins of Melody”, Evolutionary Computation, 12(2):137-158. Miranda, E. R., Roberts, S. and Stokes, M. (2004). “On Generating EEG for Controlling Musical Systems”, Biomedizinische Technik, 49(1):75-76. Westerman, G. and Miranda, E. R. (2004). “A New Model of Sensorimotor Coupling in the Development of Speech”, Brain and Language, 82(2):393-400. Miranda, E. R. (2003). “On the evolution of music in a society of self-taught digital creatures”, Digital Creativity, 14(1):29-42. Miranda, E. R. (2003). “On the Music of Emergent Behaviour: What can Evolutionary Computation Bring to the Musician?”, Leonardo, 36(1):55-58. Miranda, E. R., Sharman, K., Kilborn, K., Duncan, A. (2003). “On Harnessing the Electroencephalogram for the Musical Braincap”, Computer Music Journal, 27(2):80-102. Westerman, G. and Miranda, E. R. (2003). “Modelling the Development of Mirror Neurons for Auditory-Motor Integration”, Journal of New Music Research, 31(4):367-375. Bilotta, E., Miranda, E. R., Pantano, P and Todd, P. (2002). “Artificial Life for Musical Applications: Workshop Report”, Artificial Life, 8(1):83-86. Miranda, E. R. (2002). “Emergent Sound Repertoires in Virtual Societies”, Computer Music Journal, 26(2):77-90. Miranda, E. R., (2002). “Generating Source Streams for Extralinguistic Utterances”, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 50(3):165-172. Miranda, E. R., Correa, J. S., Wright, J. (2000). “Categorising Complex Dynamic Sounds”, Organised Sound, 5(2):95-102. Miranda, E. R., McAlpine, K. and Hoggar, S. (1999). “Making Music with Algorithms: A Case Study”, Computer Music Journal, 23(2):19-30. Miranda, E. R. (1998). “The Role of Speech Synthesis in Requiem per una veu perdudua”, Organised Sound, 3(3):235-240. Miranda, E. R. (1997). “Machine Learning and Sound Design: A Case Study”, Leonardo Music Journal, 7:49-55. Miranda, E. R. (1995). “An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Sound Design”, Computer Music Journal, 19(2):59-75. Miranda, E. R. (1995). “Granular Synthesis of Sounds by means of a Cellular Automaton”, Leonardo, 28(4):297-300. Miranda, E. R. (1995). “Cellular Automata Synthesis of Acoustic Particles”, Supercomputer, 56:16-23. Miranda, E. R. (1994). “From Symbols to Sound: AI-based Investigation of Sound Synthesis”, Contemporary Music Review, 10(2):211-232. Miranda, E. R. (1994). “Music composition using cellular automata”, Languages of Design, 2:105-117. Miranda, E. R. (1993). “Cellular Automata Music: An Interdisciplinary Project”, Interface, 22(1):3-21. Wiggins, G., Miranda, E. R., Smaill, A. and Harris, M. (1993). “A Framework for the Evaluation of Music Representation Systems”, Computer Music Journal, 17(3):31-42. |
   Last updated 123 April 2012. |