Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The research conducted in MuTant is devoted both to leveraging capabilities of musical interactions between humans and computers, and to the development of tools to foster the authoring of interaction and time in computer music. Our research program departs from Interactive music systems for computer music composition and performance introduced in mid-1980s at Ircam . Within this paradigm, the computer is brought into the cycle of musical creation as an intelligent performer [44] and equipped with a listening machine [40] capable of analyzing, coordinating and anticipating its own and other musicians' actions within a musically coherent and synchronous context. Figure 1 illustrates this paradigm. The use of Interactive Music Systems have become universal ever since and their practice has not ceased to nourish multidisciplinary research. From a research perspective, an interactive music systems deals with two problems: realtime machine listening [39] , [40] or music information retrieval from musicians on stage, and music programming paradigms [35] , [28] reactive to the realtime recognition and extraction. Whereas each field has generated subsequent literature, few attempts have been made to address the global problem by putting the two domains in direct interaction.

Figure 1. General scheme of Interactive Music Systems

In modern practices, the computer's role goes beyond rendering pre-recorded accompaniments and is replaced by concurrent, synchronous and realtime programs defined during the compositional phase by artists and programmers. This context is commonly referred to as Machine Musicianship where the computer does not blindly follow the human but instead has a high degree of musical autonomy and competence. In this project, we aim at developing computer systems and language to support real-time intelligent behavior for such interactions.

MuTant's research program lies at the intersection and union of two themes, often considered as disjoint but inseparable within a musical context:

1. Realtime music information retrieval and processing

2. Synchronous and realtime programming for computer music