How to interact at Symbolic and Structural Levels

This article presents an approach to music interaction and creativity at the symbolic and structural levels. Even if the creation of common music occurs at the symbolic level, the structural level allows interaction with music contents at a higher degree. This requires a tool to formalize music fragments and their relations in terms of transformation functions. Using Petri Nets as a tool, even real-time music composition is possible and, thanks to IEEE 1599, 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 real-time interaction scenarios will be presented.