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 belongs to the field of Interactive music systems for computer music composition and performance introduced in mid-1980s at Ircam. Within this paradigm, the computer is brought into the workflow of musical creation as an intelligent performer [64] and equipped with a listening machine [62] 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: Real-time Machine Listening [61], [62] and Synchronous and Timed Real-time Programming [28] in Computer Music. The strong coupling and union (as opposed to an intersection) of the two field has become a necessity in music practices to provide temporal scenarios describing real-time interactions between computer environments and human musicians (in forms of programs or augmented music scores), and employ them in real-time on stage with a high degree of musical autonomy and competence, whilst ensuring the major issues of fault-tolerance and time-correctness.

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

MuTant's research program has developed new Real-time Machine Listening mechanisms (see Section 3.1), new reactive and strongly timed real-time software architectures (see Section 3.2), as well as contributions to the field of verification and test on dynamic setups and work-flows such as those observed in Music (see Section 3.3). The major incarnation of our research is the award winning Antescofo language and real-time system, deployed since our inception in major international festivals with more than 100 known repertoire pieces regularly played throughout the world.