I'm giving a talk next week as part of the excellent-sounding Hearing Connections, an evening of lectures on sonification and networks. It's part of a series of events at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the 200-year-old establishment that Faraday and Medawar once called home. So, no pressure then.

I'll be discussing the relationships between sound and ecosystems, giving a whistle-stop tour of emergence, nested hierarchies and complexity, via Wolfram and Stockhausen, and hopefully culminating in a demo of some exciting new multi-level simulation work that I've been developing.

Here's the abstract:

What does a concerto have in common with a coral reef? The answer is that both are made up of nested hierarchies, in which an individual on one layer contains a population of the one below. An ecosystem comprises of multiple species, each of which contains multiple communities, made up of multiple individuals -- and an individual is itself an ecosystem of organs, cells and microbes. Likewise, a concerto comprises of movements, which comprise of parts, which comprise of notes and harmonies.

This talk is a brief tour around the relationships between music and ecology, and how their similarity can be used as a fruitful way to illuminate both our scientific and artistic practices.

• Can translating a real ecosystem into sound reveal hidden properties to us?
• Can the dynamics of an ecosystem be thought of as creative, or teach us about creativity?
• Can there be a single set of simple rules that unify all of these levels collectively?

Hearing Connections runs from 7pm on Tuesday 15 November.
More information and tickets on the Royal Institution's website.

Imperial's Complexity and Networks group are hosting a day-long meeting on music, beauty perception and neuroscience this coming May (Wednesday 19th). With a focus on the neural correlates of creative and aesthetic processes, and the complex dynamics thereof, it's one not to miss for art-and-emergence junkies.

See the attached list of talks (PDF) for more info.

James P. Crutchfield - Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence (1999)

James Crutchfield is a veteran of the Santa Fe institute and director of UC's Complexity Sciences Center. From an information-theoretic standpoint, he here considers the optimal approach for an observer to explain the behaviours emerging from a black-box natural system. The solution put forward here is to attempt to built a machine which generates a corresponding output, minimising:

• the model size, and
• the error margin between our model and the observed data

From the complexity of this model (which here takes the form of an FSA-like ε-machine), we can deduce the structural complexity of the underlying natural system. These ideas form the core of the computational mechanics field, behind which lie Crutchfield, Shalizi and others.

It's an incredibly dense yet engaging paper, itself a reduction of The Calculi of Emergence (pdf), probably the most essential piece of work on quantifying emergence and effective complexity.

Herbert Simon - Alternative Views of Complexity (1996)

Another all-too-brief excerpt, this chapter is best treated as a trailer for Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial, his canonical ode to design and structural organisation. It's a bite-sized tour of the fashions in complexity theory since WW2:

• general systems theory, the laudable search for a universal set of properties that span all holistic systems
• cybernetics, control theory and feedback
• catastrophe theory, which describes bifurcations between stable and unstable states
• chaos theory, sensitivity to initial conditions and strange attractors
• cellular automata and the Game of Life (again); and
• complexity, evolution, and genetic algorithms.

Worth a read for some context - though note that this chapter was written in 1981, so many more recent models (neural nets, self-organized criticality, agent-based models) have since had their time in the complexity limelight.

Shocked that I've never encountered this before, but Complexity Digest is a great source of current research across the spectrum of complexity, updated fortnightly. This issue: evolutionary genomics of H1H1, chaotic dynamics of urbanization, glider guns in 3D CAs, stromal cells in epithelial stem cell regulation, evolutionary game dynamics, etcetera.