Look at this piece in MusicWeek about ‘bronze format’, a new music format aimed at composers and producers and devised by a research team led by Computing’s Mick Grierson in collaboration with musician Gwilym Gold.

I asked Mick to tell us a bit more about BRONZE and how the project came into being:

“In Goldsmiths Computing Department, our Embodied Audiovisual Interaction Group (EAVI) features a number of staff and students with backgrounds in professional electronic and computer music. As a result of my work in these areas, I was approached by Gwilym Gold and Lexx to develop an idea called ‘bronze format’. It’s not really similar to generative music approaches that have been tried before by the likes of Brian Eno, and other computer music researchers. Instead, it’s been designed as a commercial music format, and so can’t be a software program that creates random mixes songs – it’s not at all random, as this isn’t really what the musicians and producers we work with want.

“It’s aimed at producers and composers who want to make any kind of music, including very organised, highly structured music, that is at a professional level equal to that which you can achieve with professional authoring tools,  but that is capable of being different each time, whilst still sounding like the same track – retaining the quality and balance of the original mixes, and the words / music in all the right places. These were the challenges we faced. I led the team from Goldsmiths as part of my Sound, Image and Brain project (funded by the AHRC). Chris Kiefer, my research assistant, and Parag Mital, a PhD student in Arts and Computational technology worked on the generative audio engine. In addition, Dan Jones, a PhD student in Computing worked on some of the iPhone audio elements.”

If you haven’t already read it, take a look at the MusicWeek article here.