Remembering the future : applications of genetic co-evolution in music improvisation. David Plans Casal 1 and Davide Morelli 2 1 University of East Anglia and Brunel University, david.plans@brunel.ac.uk, w3: http:www.davidcasal.com 2 University of Pisa info@davidemorelli.it w3: http:www.davidemorelli.it Abstract. Musical improvisation is driven mainly by the unconscious mind, engaging the dialogic imagination to reference the entire cultural heritage of an improvisor in a single flash. This paper introduces a case study of evolutionary computation techniques, in particular genetic co- evolution, as applied to the frequency domain using MPEG7 techniques, in order to create an artificial agent that mediates between an improvisor and her unconscious mind, to probe and unblock improvisatory action in live music performance or practice.... 1 Demons versus Bounded Rationality ‘ ‘Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.‘ ‘Arnold Schoenberg, ‘ ‘Brahms the Progressive‘ ‘, 1933, in Style and idea, 1950, as quoted in Nachmanovich, 1990. In the fields of cognitive science and economics, a raging battle is being fought, between those who believe human beings to be essentially rational beings, driven and informed by their preferences, endlessly calculating the probabilities for success of one decision over another, and those who believe human reasoning to operate within the bounds of the ecological reality humans face: limited time and information; and that we use fast and frugal heuristics to make most of our decisions. Gigerenzer and Todd’s [1] separation between ‘ Demons ‘ and Bounded Rationality is a clear example of this battlefront, and serves well to situate our point of departure for this paper. We believe that the processes behind musical improvisation, and therefore to a great extent those of composition, are not the result of an unbounded ra- tionality at work, empowered solely by reasoning power, experience and musical training (Demons), but are more intrinsic, frugal and driven by a bounded ra- tionality, influenced and sometimes entirely driven by the unconscious. In perhaps the most insightful book on improvisation we have read, (per- haps aside from Herrigel’s ‘Zen in the Art of Archery‘ [2]), ‘Free Play‘ Stephen Nachmanovitch [3] writes: