The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Evolution [research group]
—
PROGRAMME FORMAT
Stage I | Articulation and Presentation | November 2026
Stage I consists of two online seminars devoted to presenting and critically articulating participants’ practices, current projects, and principal research questions. Each participant or group presents work in a form appropriate to the project: papers, conceptual frameworks, literature reviews, datasets, diagrams, archives, experiments, software, instruments, interfaces, models, prototypes, demonstrations, field materials, technical documentation, or hybrid formats.
This stage does not require a completed theory or finished system. Its purpose is to make each project’s account of musical change visible. Participants will identify what varies, what persists, how information or practice is transmitted, which agents and environments condition transformation, and what evidence supports their claims. Developers will consider how design decisions embody assumptions about music, users, agency, accessibility, authorship, and value.
Discussion will examine relations among questions, methods, materials, technical architectures, and outcomes. It will ask whether projects distinguish description, explanation, prediction, and intervention; whether metaphors are treated as mechanisms; and whether claims exceed the available evidence.
Moderated peer response will help participants clarify terms, identify unexamined premises, and establish directions for development. By the end of Stage I, each participant will have formulated a provisional account of the project’s philosophical and methodological foundations and focused questions for the next phase.
Stage II | Critical Inquiry and Development | February 2027
Stage II consists of two online seminars examining the grounds, models, methods, scope, and consequences of philosophy of music evolution. Moving between shared problems and participants’ projects, the group will compare accounts of change rather than assume a single framework. It will examine where these accounts illuminate musical phenomena, where they become reductive, and where new concepts or methods are required.
Inquiry may encompass biological and cognitive accounts of musical capacities; models of variation, transmission, selection, and drift; historical approaches to continuity and rupture; ecological accounts of adaptation and interdependence; computational models of emergence; technological accounts of mediation and agency; and critiques of narratives that naturalise hierarchy, progress, replacement, or extinction.
Attention will be given to concepts transferred between disciplines. Terms borrowed from biology, computation, economics, systems theory, and engineering may be productive, but can conceal differences in scale, causality, evidence, or value. Participants will distinguish analogy from explanation and state their frameworks’ limitations as well as their capacities.
Projects will advance through discussion, testing, and critical reflection. Rather than forcing work into one academic or technical format, the seminars will strengthen conceptual precision, methodological coherence, evidence, usability, and communication. Each participant will establish a trajectory for further work: concepts to refine, claims to test, data to reconsider, design choices to evaluate, and presentation forms to develop before the public residency.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 2027
The programme culminates in research presentations, lectures, demonstrations, and public discussions at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia. This stage brings the work developed through the online seminars into an artistic, scholarly, and technological context.
Participants will present the questions, methods, systems, propositions, and outcomes of their research in forms appropriate to their projects. The emphasis is not confined to reporting completed results or showcasing finished products. Public presentation is understood as a stage of inquiry: a change of environment in which projects encounter audiences, interpretations, uses, criticisms, and possibilities.
The Bled residency offers an opportunity to test arguments and prototypes, refine language, and compare disciplinary perspectives. It creates exchange among researchers, developers, artists, performers, and audiences, enabling participants to situate projects within debates and contribute to discourse on how music changes, how change is modelled, and how musical futures are technically and institutionally shaped.
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