Many problems in robust control and motion planning can be reduced to either find a sound approximation of the solution space determined by a set of nonlinear inequalities, or to the ``guaranteed tuning problem'' as defined by Jaulin and Walter, which amounts to finding a value for some tuning parameter such that a set of inequalities be verified for all the possible values of some perturbation vector. A classical approach to solve these problems, which satisfies the strong soundness requirement, involves some quantifier elimination procedure such as Collins' Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition symbolic method. Sound numerical methods using interval arithmetic and local consistency enforcement to prune the search space are presented in this paper as much faster alternatives for both soundly solving systems of nonlinear inequalities, and addressing the guaranteed tuning problem whenever the perturbation vector has dimension one. The use of these methods in camera control is investigated, and experiments with the prototype of a declarative modeller to express camera motion using a cinematic language are reported and commented.

We present a probabilistic generative model for timing deviations in expressive music performance. The structure of the proposed model is equivalent to a switching state space model. The switch variables correspond to discrete note locations as in a musical score. The continuous hidden variables denote the tempo. We formulate two well known music recognition problems, namely tempo tracking and automatic transcription (rhythm quantization) as filtering and maximum a posteriori (MAP) state estimation tasks. Exact computation of posterior features such as the MAP state is intractable in this model class, so we introduce Monte Carlo methods for integration and optimization. We compare Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods (such as Gibbs sampling, simulated annealing and iterative improvement) and sequential Monte Carlo methods (particle filters). Our simulation results suggest better results with sequential methods. The methods can be applied in both online and batch scenarios such as tempo tracking and transcription and are thus potentially useful in a number of music applications such as adaptive automatic accompaniment, score typesetting and music information retrieval.

We present a probabilistic generative model for timing deviations in expressive music. The structure of the proposed model is equivalent to a switching state space model. We formulate two well known music recognition problems, namely tempo tracking and automatic transcription (rhythm quantization) as filtering and maximum a posteriori (MAP) state estimation tasks. The inferences are carried out using sequential Monte Carlo integration (particle filtering) techniques. For this purpose, we have derived a novel Viterbi algorithm for Rao-Blackwellized particle filters, where a subset of the hidden variables is integrated out.

We describe a computer system that provides a real-time musical accompaniment for a live soloist in a piece of non-improvised music for soloist and accompaniment. A Bayesian network is developed that represents the joint distribution on the times at which the solo and accompaniment notes are played, relating the two parts through a layer of hidden variables. The network is first constructed using the rhythmic information contained in the musical score. The network is then trained to capture the musical interpretations of the soloist and accompanist in an off-line rehearsal phase. During live accompaniment the learned distribution of the network is combined with a real-time analysis of the soloist's acoustic signal, performed with a hidden Markov model, to generate a musically principled accompaniment that respects all available sources of knowledge. A live demonstration will be provided.

This paper presents AutoDJ: a system for automatically generating music playlists based on one or more seed songs selected by a user. AutoDJ uses Gaussian Process Regression to learn a user preference function over songs. This function takes music metadata as inputs. This paper further introduces Kernel Meta-Training, which is a method of learning a Gaussian Process kernel from a distribution of functions that generates the learned function. For playlist generation, AutoDJ learns a kernel from a large set of albums. This learned kernel is shown to be more effective at predicting users' playlists than a reasonable hand-designed kernel.

This article presents a 2-phase computational learning model and application. As a demonstration, a system has been built, called CHIME for Computer Human Interacting Musical Entity. In phase 1 of training, recurrent back-propagation trains the machine to reproduce 3 jazz melodies. The recurrent network is expanded and is further trained in phase 2 with a reinforcement learning algorithm and a critique produced by a set of basic rules for jazz improvisation.

This article presents a 2-phase computational learning model and application. As a demonstration, a system has been built, called CHIME for Computer Human Interacting Musical Entity. In phase 1 of training, recurrent back-propagation trains the machine to reproduce 3 jazz melodies. The recurrent network is expanded and is further trained in phase 2 with a reinforcement learning algorithm and a critique produced by a set of basic rules for jazz improvisation.

We present a probabilistic generative model for timing deviations in expressive music. The structure of the proposed model is equivalent to a switching state space model. We formulate two well known music recognition problems, namely tempo tracking and automatic transcription (rhythm quantization) as filtering and maximum a posteriori (MAP) state estimation tasks. The inferences are carried out using sequential Monte Carlo integration (particle filtering) techniques. For this purpose, we have derived a novel Viterbi algorithm for Rao-Blackwellized particle filters, where a subset of the hidden variables is integrated out.

This paper presents AutoDJ: a system for automatically generating music playlists based on one or more seed songs selected by a user. AutoDJ uses Gaussian Process Regression to learn a user preference function over songs. This function takes music metadata as inputs. This paper further introduces Kernel Meta-Training, which is a method of learning a Gaussian Process kernel from a distribution of functions that generates the learned function. For playlist generation, AutoDJ learns a kernel from a large set of albums. This learned kernel is shown to be more effective at predicting users' playlists than a reasonable hand-designed kernel.

We describe a computer system that provides a real-time musical accompaniment for a live soloist in a piece of non-improvised music for soloist and accompaniment. A Bayesian network is developed that represents the joint distribution on the times at which the solo and accompaniment notes are played, relating the two parts through a layer of hidden variables. The network is first constructed using the rhythmic information contained in the musical score. The network is then trained to capture the musical interpretations of the soloist and accompanist in an off-line rehearsal phase. During live accompaniment the learned distribution of the network is combined with a real-time analysis of the soloist's acoustic signal, performed with a hidden Markov model, to generate a musically principled accompaniment that respects all available sources of knowledge. A live demonstration will be provided.