Musical Metacreation
Papers from the 2012 AIIDE Workshop
Philippe Pasquier, Arne Eigenfeldt, Oliver Bown, Workshop Cochairs
Technical Report WS-12-16
100 pp., $30.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-587-8
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The Musical Metacreation workshop aims to bring together artists, practitioners and researchers interested in developing software and systems that autonomously (or interactively) recognize, learn, represent, complete, accompany, compose, or interpret music. The ability to develop and use tools is a defining characteristic of human beings: from the invention of the wheel to the development of personal digital assistants, technology has continually shaped us. In recent years, the computerization of society has opened the door to the automation of information processes. Artificial intelligence, a subfield of computer sciences, has been tremendously successful at endowing machines with autonomous and proactive behaviors to achieve tasks that rely on intelligence when done by humans. As a result, machines are everywhere: omnipresent and unavoidable. they fly planes, they regulate nuclear plants, they design electric circuits, they build cars, and they play chess and Jeopardy. Thee list is seemingly endless, but can machines be creative? Computational creativity is a new and fast growing field that is exploring the automation of creative processes. It investigates creativity as it is (striving to understand and simulate human creativity) as well as creativity as it could be (processes that we know humans to be incapable of, at least without machines). It brings together academics and artists who design machines that are capable of making creative decisions. Metacreation is the idea of endowing machines with creative behavior. Metacreation, as the contemporary approach to generative art, involves using tools and techniques from artificial intelligence, artificial life, and machine learning (themselves inspired by cognitive and life sciences) to develop software systems that are cre- ative on their own. In other words, a software is a metacreation if it exhibits behaviors that would be consid- ered creative if performed by humans. While metacreation, or computational creativity, can be studied in gen- eral this workshop focuses on works that address musical expression in the sonic domain. Musical Metacreation suggests exciting new opportunities for creative music making: discovery and exploration of novel musical styles and content, collaboration between human performers and creative software "partners," and design of systems in gaming and entertainment that dynamically generate or modify music.