Leonardo

ion that computers are no more than tice [5].Resemblance is an alterna- lemof EthnographicDescWon?”AnhropdogC urlQuaric$64,No. 3,151444 (1989);andJim Kippen and Bernard Eiel, T h e Identificationand reliable storehouses of past ex- tive to truth assignment in musical periences, to the extent that a memory-based paradigm of creativity is often put forward. As Stephen Smoliar observes, “What Laske has overlooked is that the actual behaviour of making music cannot be abstracted away from the behaviour of listening to music and recalling what one has heard. . . .Ultimately, music is made so that one may listen to it. . ..The truth is that all the mind can do with music is compare it to past experiences” [3]. What Smoliar has overlooked is the central role played by the axiologica p proach in music, architecture and other design activitiessince the fifteenth century in Europe. We use the French word axiologieto designate “thelarger set of a composer’s compositional prerequisites: aesthetical, technical, philosophical, psychological , social, etc. In this way a composer ’s axiology is a larger factual field than his/her axiomatic, here taken to mean . . .a set or a system of choices deliberately decided upon by the composer” [4]. Axiology is the immaterial aspect of what Laske calls ‘task environment ’. ‘Subcognitive’activity,that is, mainly the memory of previous design tasks and the composer’s ‘inner listening’, occurs at some stage in any of the three prototypical types of rulebased composition the author is describing . Although subcognitive activity is central to improvisational composition, it is also part of interpretative composition: organizing a randomly generated string of symbols requires some experience in dealing with abstract representations of music, which in turn means a longterm acquaintance with final products : sound and scores. Perhaps a relative weakness of the paper is that it is not explicit toward possible (and desirable) extensions of event-set generation beyond the serial music system.A point we discussed with the author is that an event list that is not generated on the basis of some theory of ‘regularity’ (e.g. serial music) may well be built on a descriptive base whose dimensions are qualitative or quantitative, imbedding topological time (a partial ordering of musical features).Resemblance/dissemblance (multivalued) functions may then be computed, functions used for summarizing a structural description of the event universe as a Galois lat- ‘semantics’.Any structure may then be viewed as transfmtaons that are reflected as paths on the lattice. I am not surprised that Laske’sa p proach relates somehow to a method used for designing technical objects. Although traditional artists are not victims of the formalist folklore (the undesirable side effect of new a p proaches in Western culture), I have witnessed (although rarely) Indian musicians and dancers building a musical work or a ballet in a very similar , systematicway. Raja Chatrapati Singh’s spoken introduction to the axiomatics of his 1985drum solo composition Zndira talwas almost as long as the performance itself. Therefore, I think there is some common sense grounding in the rule-based design method. If not, we would not be able to appreciate ‘products’ like the cathedral of Florence, classicalWestern music and the Eiffel Tower. In conclusion, Laske is concerned with epistemology and aesthetics, but he is among the few who are attempting to drag them out of the realm of metaphysical speculations in order to gain insights into the essence of musical activityin its environment. Indeed, the computer-based environment described in his paper is a typical one in which intermediate representations of music (scores, whatever they may look like) play a central role. In the MIM laboratory composers use the real-time digital synthesizer SYTER along with acoustic instruments (‘interaction’ is taken to mean either sound generation or real-time sound sampling and processing, or both). This kind of set-up reintroduces the concept of a ‘musicalgesture’ and the need for acquiring such gestures, in other words, the need for learning how to play the instrument designed. Perhaps neural nets would be good learning assistants. But this environment does not invalidate the requirement of a conceptual approach to musical structures. Bernard Be1 Groupe Representationet Traitemeni desConnaissances Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 31...