New Directions In Music Tech At Siggraph

Cyrrin writes "The 2003 Siggraph conference is under way in San Diego, and the Emerging Technologies booth is showcasing several noteworthy projects in the field of human-computer interaction in music production. First, The Continuator system, from Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris which learns in real-time the style of a performing pianist, taking into account chord structures, rhythm, and melody, and then renders a musical performance in a similar style. Next is The Augmented Composer Project which uses real-time image processing to read the arrangement and orientation of symbolic cards on a table to allow a composer to assemble components of a musical phrase. Finally, those wizards at the MIT Media Lab bring you Hyperscore, a visual composition program which is intended for childen to be able to easily create complex and fantastic music sequences. (And it's fun for adults too!) Hyperscore is part of the Toy Symphony project and is available for download by going to the Musictoys->Hyperscore-> Showcase page (Windows-only though)."

Comments

Regarding the piano piece...

[James A. A. Joyce]

...the electronic musician Paul Lansky already did this on his album Ride with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it.

As seen on TV

[seekohler]

They did a bit on Hyperscore (and the Toy Symphony) on an episode of Scientific American Frontiers a few months back.

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1309/index.html

Re:What about creativity

[Hatta]

There's lots of creative music out there, it just doesn't get on the radio because it doesn't make Clear Channel money. The Jam scene is the best thing to happen to music since Pink Floyd. Check out some of the artists on the Live Music Archive or Furthurnet. The common thread is improvisation. They have to be talented to create new material every night.

Re:Musicianship is still the key

[oscillateur]

I saw demos of continuator at CSL Paris and a concert of Bernard Lubat (excellent french jazzman/improviser) *and* Continuator (operated by its creator, Francois Pachet) at the IRCAM last year.

The concert was very good, very similar to a dialog between like-minded musicians in fact. And the word dialog was carefully chosen here, as it was really a musical exchange between the human and the program. If people like Lubat (and other excellent jazzmen etc.) say that this application can create good music, I tend to trust them (and my ears/eyes) more than you, sorry.

And this program was not developed to "create new musicians", but rather to *play with* other musicians. The first sentence of the continuator's user manual is : "The Continuator is a system which learns musical styles, and with which you can play interactively."

I think you (and others) took this for what it is not...

It's a great piece of software made by musicians (i.e. people who love music) for other musicians, not for greedy corporate bastards :)

License for HyperScore

[Kaa]

HyperScore comes with an interesting license:

If you use this software to create any compositions or musical/graphical materials, you hereby grant M.I.T. the nonexclusive right to use any such materials for any purpose, and to allow others to do the same, without any accounting to you.

I read this as "all music composed using these tools enters public domain".

I don't think this is a good thing. Philosophically I don't like licenses for tools to attempt control over what YOU make with these tools.