Two different summer research projects will be featured this week: professor Bob Keller’s continuing work on Improvisor, and professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas’s work on the cophylogeny reconstruction problem.

This week’s colloquium is at Pomona.

Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation:
From Algorithms to Interactive Systems

Abstract

Mimi is a multi-modal interactive musical improvisation system that explores the impact of visual feedback in performer-machine interaction. The Mimi system enables the performer to experiment with a unique blend of improvisation-like on-the-fly invention, composition-like planning and choreography, and expressive performance. Mimi’s improvisations are created through a data structure called factor oracle. Mimi’s visual interface gives the performer and the audience instantaneous and continuous information on the state of the oracle, its recombination strategy, the music to come, and that recently played. The performer controls when the system starts, stops, and learns, the playback volume, and the recombination rate. Mimi is not only an effective improvisation partner, it also provides a platform through which to interrogate the mental models necessary for successful improvisation.