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This performance is a structured improvisation featuring a vocalist, an live sampling musician, and a musical agent based on self organizing maps from curated music corpora. A conducting agent is structuring the improvisation through text and image based prompts. The back-and-forth in this musical conversation is based around the concept of a very simple control algorithm, a conducting agent, that structures the conversation through generated text and image prompts. The performances explores different musical agency present in these four musical actors and the interplay that emerges from this dynamic.
“Three is a crowd?” plays with dramaturgy. Characterization and role-playing form an important part of improvisatory practice, with dramaturgy contributing hugely to building material, intentionality, and development in improvised work. The conducting agent, a very simple dramaturgical director, instructs the other improvising musical actors as to what dramaturgical qualities to have in quick succession.
The project is a continuation of Co-Creative Spaces, an artistic research project that asked the question “what happens to musical co-creation when AI is included in the creative cycle”. Reflections and findings from Co-Creative Spaces have been presented at NIME 2023, an article in Divergent Press and a chapter in the upcoming edition of Computer Music Journal. This project builds on both the experiences from Co-Creative Spaces and software (CCCP) that was created. CCCP listen to the other musicians on various time scales and performing a variety of weighted analysis of the incoming sound. It will generate sound by picking from a corpus of recorded material from the human musicians. How these collections are curated and put together has proved to be an important artistic decision for the co-creation process. In Co-Creative Spaces the musicians felt this gave a closeness to the material, but at the same time there was a recurring wish that the agents could have their own voice to a greater extent. This project is the first step in exploring other ways of giving the non-human agents more explicit agency in a performance as an attempt of balancing the scales further.
When the machine's agency is given greater leeway, it becomes more important to problematize what kind of culture this agency should promote. What cultural aspects are there in the software? Does the artificially intelligent musician represent a monoculture, why and how can this effect be mitigated?
Type of submission
If projected visuals are available at the club night, this would be our preferred performance space. If not, we can perform at Oxford University.
Performance 1, a concert at the Wolfson College auditorium, will feature 1-4 professional instrumental players, optional live or fixed electronics and video. Exact instrumentation will be decided based on accepted submissions. Submissions should indicate if AIMC should provide performers.
Technical/Stage Requirements
4 DI boxes
A small table for live electronics (min. 100x50cm)
One vocal microphone
Program Notes
“Three is a crowd?” is a structured improvisation featuring a vocalist, an live sampling musician, and a musical agent based on self organizing maps from curated music corpora. A conducting agent is structuring the improvisation through text and image based prompts. The back-and-forth in this musical conversation is based around the concept of a very simple control algorithm, a conducting agent, that structures the conversation through generated text and image prompts. The performances explores different musical agency present in these four musical actors and the interplay that emerges from this dynamic.
This performance plays with dramaturgy. Characterization and role-playing form an important part of improvisatory practice, with dramaturgy contributing hugely to building material, intentionality, and development in improvised work. The conducting agent, a very simple dramaturgical director, instructs the other improvising musical actors as to what dramaturgical qualities to have in quick succession.
Media
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Notto Thelle, Labdi Ommes, Morten Qvenild and Gyrid Kaldestad
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
