ABSTRACT
The basic idea of the MIROR software is to extract notes and fragments out of a player’s inputs and recombine them in novel ways in order to construct and play musical responses. Over several turns, the software collects a bank of ideas from the player; it can take elements from any of the collected inputs and combine them to produce its responses. A crucial question is to what extent the software preserved individual players’ styles, i.e. whether their original ideas and style were still recognisable to the players after MIROR had transformed them. To this end, Sony devised a recognition game for us to play with the children. As educational researchers, we were also very interested to discover what strategies the children used when trying to distinguish their music from that of other children: whether they had a concept of what their music sounded like and how they characterised it.
