RPI Researchers Developing Digital Conductor for Avant Garde Music
Baku, December 14 (AZERTAC). Stretching their boundaries, artificial intelligence researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have teamed up with musicians on an unlikely project: a digital conductor of improvised avant-garde performances.
A conductor that could guide such performances must be capable of “high level reasoning,” said Professor Selmer Bringsjord, co-principal investigator, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory, and head of the department of cognitive science at Rensselaer.
The problem is an excellent candidate for artificial intelligence because a conductor of the unpredictable musical style would need to employ interconnecting elements of cognition — perception/action, reasoning, decision-making, planning, memory — to understand and respond appropriately to the music.
“Is there a way to render in formal logic and reasoning what Leonard Bernstein does?” said Bringsjord. “We will need to capture what the musicians are doing in a musical calculus. Then the system reasons over the calculus.”
The challenge of creating a digital conductor is greater given the trio`s musical style than it would be with music that fits a set genre or convention, said Oliveros, co-principal investigator and founder of the Deep Listening movement. Deep listening is a philosophy and practice of that distinguishes between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening.
The CAIRA project builds on a two-year pilot project in which the trio built a software accompanist to their music. Their pioneering work on that project led to software that analyzes and classifies qualities related to density, texture and timbre, said Van Nort.
Oliveros said the pilot project was “mostly about getting the software to respond to what we`re playing.”
In more technical terms, Braasch explained the project as “combining algorithms that simulate human hearing through a process called auditory scene analysis and then using the extracted acoustic information to make musical decisions based on the simulation of human cognition.”
The conductor will eventually work with Oliveros on accordion, Braasch on saxophone, Van Nort as he creates electronic music on his laptop, as well as with the digital accompanist they have created.
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