The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Evolution [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the models of change structuring their work and to develop concepts through which musical evolution may become more precisely thinkable, testable, and contestable. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
What Evolves?
What is the unit of musical evolution: a perceptual capacity, gesture, motif, recording, work, technique, genre, instrument, codebase, interface, social practice, institution, or network of relations? Do these entities change independently, or only through interaction? At what scale does a variation become significant, and who determines whether continuity or transformation has occurred?
Origins, Emergence, and Multiple Beginnings
What does it mean to seek an origin for music, a practice, a technology, or a form? Does origin name a singular event, gradual differentiation, retrospective construction, or recurring act of foundation? How can research address biological capacities and early practices without reducing musical plurality to one universal story or presenting incomplete evidence as certainty?
Variation, Transmission, Selection, and Drift
How are musical differences produced, copied, taught, encoded, remembered, misheard, standardised, or forgotten? Which variations persist through deliberate choice, institutional support, environmental fit, repetition, accident, or drift? Can selection explain circulation without simplifying listeners, markets, platforms, or communities into a single environment, and without treating persistence as evidence of superior value?
Data, Models, and Evidence
What counts as evidence of musical change, and what becomes invisible when music is represented as metadata, features, taxonomies, graphs, or statistical distributions? How do datasets inherit archival exclusions and classification choices? What can models explain, and where do they merely describe correlations or reproduce assumptions? How should uncertainty, incompleteness, bias, and non-comparability be communicated?
Bodies, Cognition, and Communities
How do embodiment, development, affect, memory, coordination, disability, social learning, and cultural knowledge condition musical transformation? Which capacities may be widely shared, and which depend on specific practices and environments? How can biological or cognitive accounts contribute without naturalising current conventions, treating difference as deficiency, or separating individuals from the communities through which musical abilities acquire meaning?
Technology, Media, and Coevolution
How do instruments, notation, recording, software, platforms, networks, and artificial intelligence alter what can be imagined, performed, preserved, analysed, and circulated? Do technologies merely carry musical practices, or do users, practices, and systems coevolve? Which aesthetic assumptions, labour relations, resource demands, access conditions, and models of agency are embedded in technical architectures?
Environment, Ecology, and Adaptation
What constitutes a musical environment, and how do practices and technologies construct the niches to which they later appear adapted? How do architecture, climate, materials, energy systems, infrastructures, and other species participate in musical transformation? What is lost when adaptation is understood only as efficient adjustment rather than reciprocity, vulnerability, conflict, maintenance, or ecological cost?
Agency, Power, and Institutions
Who or what is authorised to drive change: researchers, developers, artists, communities, users, performers, audiences, technologies, markets, states, or institutions? How are some innovations amplified while others are marginalised? Which forms of power disappear when change is described as spontaneous evolution or inevitable technological progress? How might research and development redistribute rather than consolidate authority?
Value, Loss, and Musical Futures
Does change imply improvement, increased complexity, greater diversity, efficiency, or only difference? How should disappearance, obsolescence, preservation, and loss be evaluated? Which futures are presented as inevitable by current research agendas and development priorities, and which remain unsupported or unimagined? Can tools and methods cultivate conditions for musical forms, relations, and publics that do not yet exist?
These questions do not prescribe a unified theory, methodology, or evidential standard. They establish a deliberately plural field within which participants may test models against materials and practices, distinguish explanation from metaphor, challenge inherited narratives, and formulate positions responsive to the demands and consequences of their work.
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC EVOLUTION
APPLICATION
APPLICATION FORM AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Lexicon program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io