Anticipation in collaborative music performance using fuzzy systems: a case study

The creation and performance of music has inspired AI researchers since the very early times of artificial intelligence [8, 13, 10], and there is today a rich literature of computational approaches to music [11], including AI systems for music composition [3] and improvisation [2]. As pointed out by Thom [15], however, these systems rarely focus on the spontanous interaction between the human and the artificial musicians. We claim that such interaction demands a combination of reactivity and anticipation, that is, the ability to act now based on a predictive model of the companion player [12]. This paper reports our initial steps in the generation of collaborative human-machine music performance, as a special case of the more general problem of anticipation and creative processes in mixed human-robot, or anthrobotic systems [4]. We consider a simple case study of a duo consisting of a human pianist accompained by an off-the-shelf virtual drummer, and we design an AI system to control the key perfomance parameters of the virtual drummer (patterns, intensity, complexity, fills, and so on) as a function of what the human pianist is playing. The AI system is knowledge-based: it relies on an internal model represented by means of fuzzy logic.