Research Seminars

Towards Autonomous Agents for Live Computer Music: Realtime Machine Listening and Interactive Music Systems

Nick Collins
University of Sussex

Wednesday 7th March 2007, 4:00pm

Abstract

Musical agents which can interact with human musicians in concert situations are a reality, though the extent to which they themselves embody human-like capabilities can be called into question. They are perhaps most correctly viewed, given their level of artificial intelligence technology, as `projected intelligences', a composer's anticipation of the dynamics of a concert setting made manifest in programming code.

This seminar will describe a set of interactive systems developed for a range of musical styles and instruments, all of which attempt to participate in a concert by means of audio signal analysis alone. Machine listening, being the simulation of human peripheral auditory abilities, and the hypothetical modelling of central auditory and cognitive processes, is utilised in these systems to track musical activity. Whereas much of this modelling is inspired by a bid to emulate human abilities, strategies diverging from plausible human physiological mechanisms are often employed, leading to machine capabilities which exceed or differ from the human counterparts.