Interacting at the Symbolic and Structural Levels

This article presents an approach to music interaction and creativity at the symbolic and structural levels. While common music interaction occurs at the symbolic level, on a sequence of notes, it is the structural level, the focus of this writing, that allows interaction with music contents at a higher degree. This requires identification and creation of fragments of music in existing and new compositions, then the resulting set of music themes can be treated with Petri Nets, even in real time. Algorithms can be applied to modify the music synthesised or played, and, thanks to MX, this interaction is performed simultaneously at different levels. After an introduction of the main concepts, the article describes a case study based on “Peaches en Regalia”, by Frank Zappa, presented at the International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology, ice-Z, which took place in Rome on 9-10 June 2006. Finally, advanced MX scenarios will be presented.