http://cda.ularity.com Computational Design and Adaptation Tue, 25 May 2010 02:35:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Weinberg, G. (2005). Interconnected musical networks: Toward a theoretical framework. Computer Music Journal, 29(2):23–39 Weinberg (2005) discusses musical networks, the concept of performance as an interdependent art form. Electronics expands the range of possible interdependencies in musical performance: ‘Although acoustic-interdependent models provide an infrastructure for a variety of approaches for interconnections ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=483 Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf. Sacks explores the neurology of music and gives examples of patients who have various unusual responses to music. Told in a wonderful, person-focused, story-telling manner, Musicophilia expounds on music as the wonderful back door to our minds. One man ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=476 I've recently started teaching myself a new programming language: ChucK. You can read a paper by the authors that gives a quick outline of some of the salient features of the language: Wang, G., Cook, P. R. (2003). ChucK: a concurrent, on-the-fly audio programming language. In Proceedings of International Computer Music ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=473 This video is what I'd like to build: Jazari drumming robots controlled by Wiimotes and machine learning. Of course, I'm in the business of building better and more algorithms for music and other purposes, but this is the kind of hardware platform that I'd be keen to demo algorithms on. You can ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=471 Today I found this TED talk on evolving robots by Hod Lipson at Cornell. Towards the end of the talk he makes the interesting point that in absence of a particular reward, a heterogeneous population of simulated robots ends up favouring those kinds of robots that can self-replicate. Peter http://cda.ularity.com/?p=468 Today I came across and insightful discussion on a dark-ish corner of the philosophy of science: why does math describe the universe so well? The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics by Richard. W. Hamming (of Hamming distance and Hamming window fame). Originally this article appeared in The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 87 ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=464 I'm working on a simulation that has a bunch of parameters. It's getting a bit complicated, so I'm on a witch-hunt for unimportant parameters. The suspect in question is 'channel length.' The channel length can take any non-negative integer value. The ultimate output of the simulation is a random variable, ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=458 I've done a bit with echo state networks (ESNs) and mostly neglected the more neuroscience motivated liquid state machine (LSM) research. However, there is some great work going on led by W. Maass. Here are two stand-out publications: Distributed Fading Memory for Stimulus Properties in the Primary Visual Cortex ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=452 The goal of most research papers is to focus on a particular objective or hypothesis (survey papers being the major, valid exception), but most papers have lots of extraneous details coming from the exact system and configuration under study. After discussing the goal of boiling down a problem to ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=450 I saw this post in the IEEE Spectrum blog about a robotic kite flying. The group that did it, Festo, has done some other cool project like flying robot penguins. I guess it's always more impressive to demonstrate learning algorithms on big expensive hardware. But having big hardware is not essential ... http://cda.ularity.com/?p=446