AI and Music: From Composition to Expressive Performance

In this article, we first survey the three major types of computer music systems based on AI techniques: (1) compositional, (2) improvisational, and (3) performance systems. For this reason, previous approaches, based on following musical rules trying to capture interpretation knowledge, had serious limitations. An alternative approach, much closer to the observation-imitation process observed in humans, is that of directly using the interpretation knowledge implicit in examples extracted from recordings of human performers instead of trying to make explicit such knowledge. In the last part of the article, we report on a performance system, SAXEX, based on this alternative approach, that is capable of generating high-quality expressive solo performances of jazz ballads based on examples of human performers within a case-based reasoning (CBR) system.