Imagine that a budding composer suffers from writer's block partway through devising a melody. A system called FreshJam is demonstrated, which offers a solution to this problem in the form of an interactive composition assistant; an algorithm that analyzes the notes composed so far, makes a comparison with an indexed corpus of existing music, and suggests a possible next note by choosing randomly among continuations of matched melody fragments. We provide a demonstration of FreshJam as an aid in stylistic composition, and of its potential to be more iterative than existing composition assistants such as PG Music's Band in a Box or Microsoft's Songsmith.

Neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been employed to learn, generalize, and generate musical examples and pieces. Yet, these models typically suffer from an inability to characterize and reproduce the long-term dependencies of musical structure, resulting in products that seem to wander aimlessly. We describe and examine three novel hierarchical models that explicitly operate on multiple structural levels. A three layer model is presented, then a weighting policy is added with two different methods of control attempting to maximize global network learning. While the results do not have sufficient structure beyond the phrase or section level, they do evince autonomous generation of recognizable medium-level structures.

In this paper we introduce a prototype of ’meta-score’, a novel visual editor in PWGL, aimed at defining the structural, temporal and procedural properties of a musical composition. Meta-score is a music notation editor, thus, the score can be created manually by inputting the information using a GUI. However, meta-score extends the concept of a musical score so that the musical content can be defined not only manually but also procedurally. The composition is defined by placing scores (hence the name meta-score) on a timeline, creating dependencies between the objects, and defining the compositional processes associated with them. Meta-score presents the users with a three-stage compositional process beginning from the sketching of the overall structure along with the associated harmonic, rhythmic and melodic material; continuing with the procedural description of the composition and ending with the automatic production of the performance score. In this paper, we describe the present state of meta-score.

The Melody Triangle is an interface for the discovery of melodic materials, where the input – positions within a triangle – directly map to information theoretic properties of the output. A model of human expectation and surprise in the perception of music, information dynamics, is used to ‘map out’ a musical generative system’s parameter space. This enables a user to explore the possibilities afforded by a generative algorithm, in this case Markov chains, not by directly selecting parameters, but by specifying the subjective predictability of the output sequence. We describe some of the relevant ideas from information dynamics and how the Melody Triangle is defined in terms of these. We describe its incarnation as a screen based performance tool and compositional aid for the generation of musical textures; the users control at the abstract level of randomness and predictability, and some pilot studies carried out with it. We also briefly outline a multi-user installation, where collabo- ration in a performative setting provides a playful yet informative way to explore expectation and surprise in music, and a forthcoming mobile phone version of the Melody Triangle.

Quantum mechanical systems exist as superpositions of complementary states that collapse to classical, concrete states upon becoming entangled with the measurement apparatus of observer-participants. A musical composition and its performance constitute a quantum system. Historically, conventional musical notation has presented the appearance of a composition as a deterministic, concrete entity, with interpretation approached as an extrinsic act. This historical perspective inhabits a subspace of the available quantum space. A quantum musical system unifies the composition, instruments, situated performance and perception as a superposition of musical events that collapses to concrete musical events via the interactions and perceptions of performers and audience. A composer captures superposed musical events via implicit or explicit conditional event probabilities, and human and/or machine performers create music by collapsing interrelated probabilities to zeros and ones via observer-participancy.

One of the goals of the study of music theory is to develop sets of rules to describe different styles of music. By formalising these rules so that their semantics are machine intelligible, it is possible to use computers to reason about and analyse these rules -- computational music theory. Anton is an automatic composition system based on this approach. It formalises the rules of Renaissance Counterpoint using AnsProlog and uses an answer set solver to compose pieces. This paper discusses Anton, presenting the ideas behind the system and focusing on the challenges of modelling and synthesising rhythm.

This paper discusses emerging creative practices that involve interacting with generative computational systems, and the effect of such cybernetic interactions on our conceptions of creativity and agency. As computing systems have become more powerful in recent years, real time interaction with intelligent computational processes and models has emerged as a basis for innovative creative practices. Examples of these practices include interactive digital media installations, generative art works, live coding performances, virtual theatre, interactive cinema, and adaptive processes in computer games. In these types of activities computational systems have assumed a significant level of agency, or autonomy, that provoke questions about shared authorship and originality that are redefining our relationship with technologies and prompting new questions about human capabilities, values and the meaning of productive activities.

Beyond the goal of refining system design to the needs and tastes of users, user evaluation of interactive music systems offers a method of examining the nature of musical creativity as understood by its human practitioners. In the case of improvising music systems, user study and evaluation of a system’s ability to improvise may be useful in the ethnomusicological study of musical interaction in contemporary improvised music. A survey of preliminary findings based on the interactions of an improvising system, Maxine, with several improvisers is discussed, with results suggesting methodological reconfigurations of the purpose and goals of evaluating of interactive musical metacreations.

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. 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).

Influence Maps have been successfully used in controlling the navigation of multiple units. In this paper, we apply the idea to the problem of simulating a kiting behavior (also known as ¨attack and flee'¨) in the context of real-time strategy (RTS) games. We present our approach and evaluate it in the popular RTS game StarCraft, where we analyze the benefits that our approach brings to a StarCraft playing bot.