Eduardo Reck Miranda


Eduardo Reck Miranda is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electroacoustic pieces but is most notable in the United Kingdom for his scientific research into computer music, particularly in the field of human-machine interfaces where brain waves will replace keyboards and voice commands to permit the disabled to express themselves musically.

Biography

Early life

Miranda was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As one of the largest cities in Southern Brazil and a cultural, political and economical center, Porto Alegre had significant influence on Miranda's music.

Education

In the early 1990s, Miranda attended the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos in Brazil where he received a degree in Data Processing Technology in 1985. Miranda then attended the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul where he studied music composition. Desiring to learn more about music technology and experience more of the world, Miranda made his way to the United Kingdom, where he started his post-graduate research studies at the University of York. At York, he developed an in-depth study into musical composition using cellular automata. In 1991, he received his MSc in Music Technology from York. After receiving his MSc, Miranda went briefly to Germany to study algorithmic composition at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe.
In 1992, Miranda gained admittance to the Faculty of Music of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he obtained his PhD in the combined fields of music and artificial intelligence in 1995. For his doctoral thesis, he focused on musical knowledge representation, machine learning of music and software sound synthesis.

Experiences

After receiving his PhD, Miranda worked at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. At EPCC, he developed Chaosynth, an innovative granular synthesis software that uses cellular automata to generate complex sound spectra.
In the mid-1990s, Miranda joined the Department of Music at the University of Glasgow, where he lectured music technology and electroacoustic music composition for a number of years. Then he moved to Paris, to take up a research position at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in the late 1990s.
At Sony, Miranda conducted research aimed at gaining a better understanding of the fundamental cognitive mechanisms employed in sound-based communication systems. This research led Miranda to focus on the evolution of the human ability to speak and the role of our musical capacity in the development of spoken languages. While at Sony, Miranda filed patents in the field of speech processing and made scientific contributions in the fields of speech synthesis, evolutionary music and cognitive neural modeling.
In the early 2000s he was appointed Visiting Professor of Interactive Media Arts at MECAD in Barcelona and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at the American University of Paris.
In 2003 Miranda moved to the University of Plymouth in the UK where he presently is a full Professor in Computer Music and Head of the '. He is also an active associate member of the ' at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in his native town of Porto Alegre.

Musical compositions

Miranda's musical compositions have been broadcast and performed in a number of concerts and festivals worldwide, including the Festival Latino-Americano de Arte e Cultura, the Encompor, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, the Festival Elektronischer Frühling, and the Ciclo Acusmático. His music has won prizes and distinctions in Europe and South America, including awards at the Concours International de Musique Électroacoustique de Bourges, the Concurso de Composição de Londrina and the Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo di Musica Elettroacustica. A review of his latest solo CD Mother Tongue, in The Wire magazine, reads, "These are immensely sophisticated pieces that constitute an electronic global music of convincingly organic simplicity."

Scientific research

Miranda is an active researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Music. He is currently conducting research into neuroscience of music and into simulations of biological natural processes in music origins and evolution. Miranda has turned to artificial life models to coax computers into composing music.
Just as IBM's Deep Blue showed the world a computer can play chess as well as a human master, Miranda aims to demonstrate a computer program able to compose original music. So far, neural networks have succeeded in imitating distinct musical styles, but truly original compositions have remained elusive. Miranda is tackling this problem with an orchestra of virtual musician agents who interact to compose original music.

Published works

Print (language)

Published books

Miranda's papers have been published by many international journals, including Evolutionary Computation, Brain and Language, Digital Creativity, Contemporary Music Review, Computer Music Journal, Journal of New Music Research, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Leonardo, Leonardo Music Journal, and Organized Sound.

Samples of published journal papers

Orchestral music