04.26 - Digital Da Vinci Book Chapter on Mimi

Schankler, Isaac, Elaine Chew, and Alexandre R. J. Francois. (2014). Improvising with Digital Auto-scaffolding: How Mimi changes and enhances the creative process. In Newton Lee (ed.): Digital Da Vinci—Computers in Music, 99-125, Springer. ISBN 978-1-4939-0535-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0536-2_5.


Access Options

Individual chapter: SpringerLink Hardcover book: Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

Abstract: This chapter poses, and proposes some answers to, questions about the origins and nature of creativity when digital media takes an active role in the music-making process. The discussions are centered on François’ Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation) system, which enables a musician to seed the computer with musical ideas and then improvise atop re-combinations of these ideas; the system provides the musician with visual foreknowledge of the machine’s intent and review of the interaction. They extend to the different instantiations of, and extensions to, the Mimi system, which are designed with various interaction nuances in mind, and engender new forms of creativity. We review each Mimi version, from the original blue-and-white silhouette display, to the Scriabin-inspired varicolored panels, to the multi-paneled user-directed Mimi4x. In each scenario, we consider the impact of Mimi on the creative process and the resulting performance; specifically, we describe the interaction between a performer, the composer (when this is different from the performer), and the system, analyzing the techniques used to successfully negotiate a performance with Mimi, and the formal musical structures that result from this interaction.


Supplemental material (video):

Analysis of performance with Schankler and Mimi.

10.08-12 - MuCoaCo Alumni @ ISMIR

Three MuCoaCo alumni - Ching-Hua Chuan, Erdem Unal, and ChangHyun (Daniel) Kim - and two current PhD students - Jordan Smith and Katerina Kosta - attended ISMIR in Porto, Portugal, this year.  The posters presented were as follows:

Chuan, C. & Chew, E. (2012). Creating Ground Truth for Audio Key Finding: When the Title Key May Not Be the Key. [ pdf ]

Kosta, K., Marchini, M. & Purwins, H. (2012). Unsupervised Chord-Sequence Generation from an Audio Example [ pdf ]

Unal, E., Bozkurt, B. & Karaosmanoğlu, M. (2012). N-gram Based Statistical Makam Detection on Makam Music in Turkey Using Symbolic Data [ pdf ]

Ching-Hua Chuan is founder of the WiMIR (Women in Music Information Retrieval) special interest group that met a second time in a row at ISMIR.

Daniel Kim, currently a PhD candidate at KAIST, participated in the audio onset detection MIREX competition.

02.28 - New Music Box publishes article by Isaac Schankler

Sounds Heard: Anatomy of a Truth-Bender
February 28, 2012 / By Isaac Schankler

It’s easy to understand the appeal of an article like the Wall Street Journal‘s “Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker,” which purports to explain why Adele’s hit song “Someone Like You” makes people cry. Unfortunately, the article is marred by a number of scientific, musical, and aesthetic misconceptions, some glaring and some more subtle.

02.25 - VRME Bamberger tribute issue now available

Creativity SRIG sponsored Jeanne Bamberger tribute issue of VRME now available.  Message from the editors, S. Alex Ruthman and Gena R. Greher:

At the 2010 meeting of the Creativity SRIG, we were treated to a keynote presentation by eminent music cognition scholar Jeanne Bamberger. For over 40 years, her research and scholarship in the fields of music cognition, music learning, intuition and creativity has had, and continues to have, a profound international impact within and beyond music-related fields.

After her presentation, the Creativity SRIG announced a call for submissions to a special tribute issue of Visions of Research in Music Education (VRME) in honor of Jeanne’s work and career. We are thrilled to announce the publication of that tribute issue as Volume 20  of Visions of Research in Music Education .
:
This special issue of VRME contains 12 feature articles and essays with authors hailing from Australia, Germany, Israel, the UK and the US:

Editorial
Gena R. Greher & Alex Ruthmann - Curiosity, Creativity and Cognition: A Window into Jeanne Bamberger’s Work.

Featured Articles
Howard Gardner - Tribute to Jeanne Bamberger: Pre-eminent Student of Musical Development and Cognition in Our Time.
Gena R. Greher & S. Alex Ruthmann - On Chunking, Simples and Paradoxes: Why Jeanne Bamberger’s Research Matters.
Andrew Brown - Experience Design and Interactive Software in Music Education Research.
Kimberley Lansinger Ankney - Building and Composing upon Musical Knowledge.
Michael P. Downton, Kylie A. Peppler, Adena Portowitz, Jeanne Bamberger, & Eric Lindsay - Composing Pieces for Peace: Using Impromptu to Build Cross-Cultural Awareness.
Jessica Krash - Reminiscence on Studying with Jeanne Bamberger.
Joyce Kouffman - Jeanne Bamberger - Vignettes from 1974-1976.
Wilfred Gruhn - Representations of Music - Neural Foundations and Mental Processes.
Craig Graci - Channeling Bamberger: An Unorthodox Appreciation of Jeanne Bamberger’s work on Musical Development and Musical Understanding.
Elaine Chew - About Time: Strategies of Performance Revealed in Graphs.
Christopher F. Hasty - Learning in Time.
Deborah V. Blair - Do you hear what I hear? Musical Maps and Felt Pathways of Musical Understanding. (a reprint from VRME Volume 11)

Historical Reprint:
Jeanne Bamberger - Developing Musical Structures: Going Beyond the Simples.

Access to these articles and essays may be found at http:www-usr.rider.edu/~vrme .

03.14 - Article accepted to MCM

An article submitted by the lab to the 3rd International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM 2011) has just been accepted! It is entitled "Emergent formal structures of factor oracle-driven musical improvisations" and was co-authored by Isaac Schankler, Jordan Smith, Alexandre François, and Elaine Chew.

The article investigates the formal structure of several improvisations performed by Isaac interacting with Mimi: a number of formal analyses of these performances are presented, after which several typical structures (such as rondo- and canon-like structures) are observed. Finally, potential reasons for the emergence of these structures are discussed.

Structure analyses of Performance 1

Structure analyses of Performance 2

Structure analyses of Performance 3

The above annotations were created by the improviser (Schankler) and an experienced structure analyst (Smith).

The MCM 2011 conference takes place from June 15 to 18 in Paris, France at IRCAM.

03.07 - Jordan Smith's Master's thesis

The final version of lab member Jordan Smith's Master's thesis, completed at McGill University under Prof. Ichiro Fujinaga, has this past month been submitted and approved. It describes a MIREX-like evaluation (i.e., a benchmark evaluation) of music structure analysis algorithms. A direct download link is here: PDF.

Others working on music structure analysis may be interested in downloading the evaluation data, all of which are public and downloadable at Jordan's website. The thesis also introduces a modest new data set for structure analysis that consists entirely of public domain recordings, so anyone can download and share it.

Jordan continues to work on music structure-related research both at MuCoaCo (he and Isaac Schankler recently submitted an article to MCM on the structure of improvisations performed with Mimi) and back at McGill, through the SALAMI project which has created a large new database of structural analyses.

09.24 - NAE US FOE Symposium

Elaine Chew was an invited speaker at the 2010 NAE FOE Symposium at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, NY.

From September 23 to 25, 'about 100 outstanding engineers under the age of 45 met for an intensive 2-1/2 day symposium to discuss cutting-edge developments in four areas: Cloud Computing, Engineering and Music, Autonomous Aerospace Systems, and Engineering Inspired by Biology.'

Elaine's talk in the session on Engineering and Music was titled "De-mystifying Music and Its Performance."  The paper based on her talk and the presentation slides can be downloaded from the program website.

A version of the paper has been selected to appear in the winter issue of The Bridge, the NAE quarterly, which is 'disseminated to NAE members, government agencies, members of Congress, libraries, university departments, and a wide range of interested individuals (about 7,000 in all).'

These and more photos by the symposium photographer have been posted on the NAE Frontiers website.

08.12 - Chinghua's Poster @ ISMIR in Utrecht

Ching-Hua Chuan presents a poster on "Quantifying the Benefits of Using an Interactive Decision Support Tool for Creating Musical Accompaniment in a Particular Style" (paper pdf) at the 11th ISMIR in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

07.23 - Mimi4x @ IMIDA Workshop

Mimi4x, an interactive installation for high level structural improvisation based on Mimi, is unveiled at IMIDA 2010, an IEEE Conference on Multimedia & Expo workshop.  Alex François and Elaine Chew present the paper:

Francois, A. R. J., I. Schankler, E. Chew (2010). Mimi4x: An Interactive Audio-Visual Installation for High-Level Structural Improvisation. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2010), Singapore, July, 2010.

and demonstrate Mimi4x in Singapore.  The Mimi4x system is also shown in the video below with four sets of music material composed by Isaac Schankler collectively titled Airport:

The paper will be extended and included in a special issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology.

01.31 - MCM Reviewed in CMJ

Jonathan Bragg and Anna Huang's review the Mathematics and Computation in Music meeting appears in the Computer Music Journal 34(1): [ html ]