The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Evolution [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that music is never static and that accounts, models, and technologies of change are never neutral. Musical practices inherit materials, techniques, institutions, environments, and values. Research selects objects, evidence, scales, and explanatory terms. Developed systems enable some actions while constraining others. Philosophy of music evolution therefore concerns how change is recognised, represented, measured, accelerated, redirected, or prevented.
Evolution may refer to processes that must not be collapsed together. Capacities for rhythm, vocalisation, entrainment, pattern recognition, affect, and coordination have biological and developmental histories. Musical practices circulate through imitation, pedagogy, notation, recording, migration, ritual, broadcasting, and digital networks. Instruments and media alter what bodies can do and what sounds can be generated, stored, analysed, and distributed. Genres, institutions, standards, datasets, interfaces, and user practices also change through collective use and negotiation.
These processes interact without sharing the same units, mechanisms, directions, or timescales. A model tracing a melodic pattern may not explain institutional transformation. Biological inheritance differs from cultural learning; technological replacement from stylistic mutation; statistical regularity from historical causation; and system optimisation from communal value. Participants must therefore specify what evolves, through which mechanisms, in which environment, and on what evidence.
Evolutionary language carries powerful historical and political legacies. Progress, development, fitness, primitiveness, survival, and extinction have been used to rank musical cultures, naturalise inequality, and present local values as universal. Data classifications and computational models can reproduce these hierarchies when categories appear natural, archives complete, or popularity equivalent to cultural significance.
The residency rejects any assumption that musical change moves towards one higher, more complex, more efficient, or technologically advanced form. It treats evolutionary narratives and technical models as objects of inquiry, asking whose perspectives they centre, which continuities they construct, which differences they erase, and which losses or exclusions they render inevitable.
Critical caution, however, need not lead to abandoning evolutionary thought. Concepts of variation, inheritance, transmission, selection, drift, adaptation, coevolution, niche construction, convergence, divergence, emergence, and path dependence can illuminate musical processes when their scope and limitations are defined. They can help distinguish intentional innovation from cumulative change, explain how distributed actions produce large-scale patterns, and show how musical practices transform their environments while being transformed by them.
Research and development do not merely observe transformation from outside. An archive changes what can be remembered and compared. Classification establishes differences that may later appear self-evident. Recommendation systems influence circulation. Interfaces distribute agency among designers, users, performers, and machines. Generative models reorganise materials and expectations concerning authorship, labour, and creativity. New instruments create capacities that may become traditions.
For this reason, developed systems are approached as philosophical propositions in operative form. Their data structures, categories, parameters, defaults, interaction models, performance criteria, and failure modes embody claims about what music is, which features matter, who acts, and what counts as a successful outcome. Technical design can therefore be examined as a mode of conceptual and institutional intervention.
The programme investigates a reciprocal relation among philosophy, research, and development. Philosophy clarifies concepts and exposes normative commitments. Empirical and historical research tests claims against evidence and context. Development materialises models, making their affordances and consequences available for use and critique. The central question is not simply, “How has music evolved?” It is also: “How do our methods and systems participate in selecting, stabilising, or transforming what music may become?”
Such inquiry demands attention to infrastructures as well as artefacts. Musical possibilities are shaped by educational systems, archives, platforms, standards, funding structures, copyright regimes, instrument manufacture, energy and material resources, performance economies, and algorithms of search and recommendation. These conditions influence what is transmitted, which practices become visible, who can participate, and which variations are likely to endure.
This expanded field does not dissolve music into a general theory of change; it describes musical transformation more precisely. Music remains a situated organisation of sound, action, attention, memory, relation, and value. Yet its forms cannot be secured by one origin, lineage, medium, dataset, or path. Philosophy of music evolution becomes necessary where inherited histories, models, and technologies cannot account for musical plurality and contested direction.
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