viterbi early career chair 2005-2006 lecture series: gerard assayag: abstracts

DEMONSTRATION: TUE, April 4, 2006, 12:30PM - 1:30PM, MacDonald Recital Hall (formerly MUS 106)

Improvising with the Computer using OMax, a Statistical Learning Environment

This demonstration features OMax, a machine improvization system designed by G. Assayag and M. Chemillier, in concert with Dennis Thurmond, director of keyboard pedagogy at the Thornton School of Music. Machine learning of musical style uses statistical modeling of melodies or polyphonies to recreate variants of musical examples. When the learning process is performed on the fly by "listening" to a musician play and the generation itself may happen in the same time, as will be demonstrated in this session, then a real-time man/machine improvisation experience becomes possible.
        The OMax system consists of a hybrid architecture that combines two popular composition/perfomance environments formerly designed at IRCAM: OpenMusic (by G. Assayag and C. Agon) and Max (a real time environment created by M. Puckette and D. Zicarelli). These two subsystems operate at different time scales, and communicate together in a way that evokes the well known working memory / longterm memory paradigm, so that the resulting improvisation experience is not restricted to instantaneous action-reaction processes. As the digital partner learns from its music master, a sort of clone emerges that recombines material extracted from the past, while maintaining a certain stylistic consistency. The performer thus plays with a distorted self recalled from past moments in what could be called a "stylistic feed-back" loop.

(top left: OMax improvization poster is a painting by Martin Lartigues.)

LECTURE: WED, April 5, 2006, 2:30PM - 4:00PM, GER309

Computer Assisted Composition at IRCAM: the OpenMusic environment

This lecture provides a general introduction to computer assisted composition research at IRCAM, with a special focus on the OpenMusic (OM) project. The OM visual programming environment was designed at IRCAM by G. Assayag and C. Agon to help composers set up the programs necessary to prepare complex music material structured by rules of their own construction. OM brings an experimental dimension to the compositional activity. By providing a description of some characteristics of a musical process, either in a formal, algorithmic or even purely graphical way, the composer gets a model of music material, both out-of- and in-time. The model can then be simulated for the purpose of verifying hypotheses, observing emerging behaviours, and finally generating and archiving effective material for the composition. As composition is, among other definitions, a "synthesis of time", various time structures are made available: global time, local time, and logical time. These structures may be defined in a graphical way and interact in order to build complex formal organizations, where musical parts in the piece may exist in functional or logical relations one to another. This leads to a renewed concept of the "score", which now becomes a dynamic network of interrelated musical components, making it easy for generating and testing new musical ideas.

WORKSHOP: THU, April 6, 2006, 2:30PM - 4:00PM, GER309

OpenMusic and OMax under the cover

This workshop will provide a practical introduction to OpenMusic (OM). OM is a visual programming language based on CommonLisp / CLOS. OM is icon oriented, uses extensively drag-and-drop, and has built-in visual control structures that interface with Lisp ones, such as the loop. OM Projects live above the OM kernel; a project is a specialized set of classes and methods directly written in Lisp, accessible and visualizable in the OM environment. OM may be used as a general purpose functional/object/visual programming language. At a more specialized level, a set of classes and libraries make it a very convenient environment for music composition. Objects are symbolized by icons, and most operations are performed by dragging an icon from a particular place and dropping it to another place. Numerous examples of classes implementing musical data/behaviour will be provided. These classes are associated with graphical editors, and can be readily extended by the user to meet specifical needs. Different representations of a musical process are handled, among them common notation, MIDI, piano-roll, and sound signal. High-level in-time organization of the music material is proposed through the maquette concept. The session concludes with a description of OMax, the machine improvisation system built on OM and Max (the real time environment by M. Puckette and D. Zicarelli).

speaker: [ assayag ] pianist: [ thurmond ] info: [ abstracts | poster(pdf) ] organizer: [ chew ] links: [ top | series ]