09.30 - Mimi Concert Video Annotated

Video of the concert debut of Mimi with Isaac Schankler at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena on Saturday, June 5, 2010, as part of the People Inside Electronics concert event, Vicious Circles and Deadly Elements.

Mimi, which stands for multimodal interaction for musical improvisation, is a system for human-machine improvisation.  Mimi was created by Alexandre François using his Software Architecture for Immersipresence.

In Mimi, the computer learns from the human musician, creates a factor oracle from the music input, and recombines the material to generate improvisations like the music it 'hears'.  The visualizations show the music stream from the computer and from the human, the music material Mimi learns, and how the system recombines the material. 

The human musician determines when Mimi learns, when it starts/stops improvising, and the recombination rate.  The annotations in the video provided by Isaac shows this decision process, and reveals the improviser's thought process as the performance unfolds.

Isaac is a composer-pianist-improviser who received his DMA in Composition from the USC Thornton School of Music in 2010; he is currently a research consultant at MuCoaCo.