The group explores creative musical possibilities generated through the bringing together of different cultures and traditions, placing a strong emphasis on the use of both ancient African instruments and the most recent music technology. The members of Beta Foly compose and improvise eclectic, polymetric music, trying to combine styles in innovative ways in order to find new avenues for composition, ensemble interplay and cross-cultural understanding. Zuben, Fernando von. This article introduces Vox Populi, a system based on evolutionary computation techniques for composing music in real time. In Vox Populi, a population of chords codified according to MIDI protocol evolves through the application of genetic algorithms to maximize a fitness criterion based on physical factors relevant to music.
Graphical controls allow the user to manipulate fitness and sound attributes.
Digital resynthesis techniques are integrated in the compositional process by means of environmental sound models. Ecological models establish formal relationships without obscuring the recognizability of everyday sounds. Materials, techniques, perceptual constraints and references to social issues are integrated in a consistent compositional method. The author maps rhythms from African and Indonesian musics into cyclic arrays and analyzes them using concepts from Gestalt psychology, mathematical group theory and psycho-acoustics. The perceptual structures thus revealed exist between the different musical parts played on various instruments and contradict the usual processes of auditory segregation according to the physical locations of instrumentation.