How can we compose better music?

I just read this excellent article about the causes of musical frission, what makes a particular moment in a piece of music strike you as just right. It would be nice to see these ideas built into an automatic composition program like Melody Generator. In the book I mentioned how a sunset can induce strong feelings through an unguided process.  I don't see any reason we couldn't make a system that generates beautiful music like the atmosphere generates beautiful sunsets.

In fact, it might be cool just to make an artificial sunset generator using a fluid simulation and the physics of light passing through clouds.  This is an image I made years ago using POV-ray and Perlin noise functions:

 I think it gets the cloud shapes about right, though the lighting needs a lot of work.

Physiological and Musico-Acoustic Correlates of the Chill Response

Martin Guhn, Alfons Hamm and Marcel Zentner

Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Vol. 24, No. 5 (June 2007), pp. 473-484 

Anima in Anime

Anima in Anime: the nature of the soul in Japanese animation.

I just thought that would be a fun essay to read. It would discuss Ghost in the Shell, The Spirits Within, Paprika, maybe... what else do you think would be good?
I read a book about Ki (the Japanese symbol for breath and spirit) when I was trying to learn Kanji while living in Nagoya. Since my English reading material at the time was so limited, I have an almost supernatural memory for anything I read at the time.
Edit: I've just finished watching the anime series Mushishi. In these stories, the spirits are more like insects or fungus. They are a natural phenomenon that sometimes affect people when their lives intersect. I highly recommend it. 

19

This looks like an interesting resource on 19th century views of the body as machine.
http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/70

Llull, Bruno, Borges, and the fourth dimension

Charles Hinton worked on visualizing the fourth dimension.  There are some interesting connections between his techniques and and other visualization methods like the Ars Memoria. (Ramon Llull, you'll recall, invented a way of recombining words to make new ideas called the Ars Combinitorica, which influenced Leibniz's grand AI project. Jorge Borges, the scholar and author, commented on Llull and on ontologies.)  Check out the links below.

http://www.waggish.org/2010/charles-hinton/

http://ideafoundlings.blogspot.com/2009/10/maelstroms-from-renaissance.html

http://higherspace.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/borges-on-hinton/

Also, Boole's daughter (I discuss both her parents in the book) was adept at visualizing the fourth dimension.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/stott.htm

Aeolian harps

This is an Aeolian harp, driven by the wind.  I talk about them a bit in the book, but you really need to listen to one to understand the description.
Steve Cameron is an artist who built one as designed by Athanasius Kircher. Here is a link to his videos.

Here is another one to listen to. Does it remind anyone else of the Myst games?

Natural magic

Ken Perlin (my advisor when I was at NYU) gave a talk recently in Hong Kong. Notice how the tech demo resembles a magic show.  The connection between stage magic and science/technology that was pervasive at the time of Athanasius Kircher and has never really gone away.

Cabinet magazine published an interesting interview on this topic with Simon During.  During contends that magic (in the sense of stage magic) has had a huge influence on the film industry, advertising, and art. All of these take advantage of illusions.

AARON

AARON is Harold Cohen's artistic program.  It was available as a screensaver from Kurzweil for a while. I mentioned in the book that Cohen didn't consider his program creative, but he is interested in figuring out what he would need to do to make it creative.  In an article in Wired magazine, he says:

"All the time in the back of mind is the question of machine autonomy. The problem I would face if I ever figured out how to do it, in giving Aaron as it were its own head, is I might hate what it does...If the program did a drawing in August that it couldn't have done when I stopped programming it in January, then I'll consider it creative."

It wouldn't be hard to achieve what he is asking for in a trivial way-- the program could take in new imagery from the web to learn new leaf shapes, for example.  But I suspect more than this would be needed for Cohen to feel satisfied. When he says, "I might hate what it does" that might be okay if other people liked it. The question is if we can set a program free and yet give it enough of a human sense of aesthetics that any people will like what it produces.

Another good article is from a course page at MIT about genetics and culture.  This describes a little of how the code works, and the design process behind the program. 

Cohen's own writings on the subject

Wikipedia article