The Use of Stochastic Processes as a Creative Resource in the Development of a Compositional System

Abstract

The development of a compositional system (Pitombeira 2020) can make use of mathematics as a powerful tool for specifying rules. The biggest property of this usage is that it supports abstraction, making it an excellent medium for modeling (Pressman 1994). Concepts extracted from it provide a basis for Xenakis compositional process (Xenakis 1992). Stochastic, one of the areas of mathematics selected by the composer, can be applied to the elaboration of the architecture of a compositional system in order to combine pre-existing elements of the composition or to work with musical or extra-musical objects, resulting in the expansion of the creative process. With this feature, a Markovian compositional system called Doroteia is proposed and as an applied result of the research, some pieces are elaborated, each of them conducted by literary excerpts extracted from the book of the Oulipiano writer Italo Calvino (Calvino 1990).