Axon

Axon was written for Marilene Provencher-Leduc (flute) and Gaspard Daigle (contrabass), commissioned by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal and Jeunesse Musicales in connection with the juried award from the ECM+ Generations tour 2016. This score was written during the Spring and Summer of 2017.

The title of Axon refers to the long, thread-like part of a nerve cell that transmits pulses of electricity as communication throughout the human body. This music considers harmonic relationships as a metaphor for neural connection and individual pitches as neural nodes, which together create a network of relationships that are explored in musical terms.

Contemporaneously to writing this piece, the idea of neural networks and deep learning being used to write music is in rapid development with the first few companies advertising computer-generated commercial music solutions. This is a promising area of research, where algorithmic composition based on a model could iterate infinite variations in a similar style. In the case of this piece of music, the idea of a neural network is more of a metaphor and a strict algorithmic approach is not followed.