7,747 research outputs found
A Planning-based Approach for Music Composition
. Automatic music composition is a fascinating field within computational
creativity. While different Artificial Intelligence techniques have been used
for tackling this task, Planning – an approach for solving complex combinatorial
problems which can count on a large number of high-performance systems and
an expressive language for describing problems – has never been exploited.
In this paper, we propose two different techniques that rely on automated planning
for generating musical structures. The structures are then filled from the bottom
with “raw” musical materials, and turned into melodies. Music experts evaluated
the creative output of the system, acknowledging an overall human-enjoyable
trait of the melodies produced, which showed a solid hierarchical structure and a
strong musical directionality. The techniques proposed not only have high relevance
for the musical domain, but also suggest unexplored ways of using planning
for dealing with non-deterministic creative domains
Deep Cross-Modal Audio-Visual Generation
Cross-modal audio-visual perception has been a long-lasting topic in
psychology and neurology, and various studies have discovered strong
correlations in human perception of auditory and visual stimuli. Despite works
in computational multimodal modeling, the problem of cross-modal audio-visual
generation has not been systematically studied in the literature. In this
paper, we make the first attempt to solve this cross-modal generation problem
leveraging the power of deep generative adversarial training. Specifically, we
use conditional generative adversarial networks to achieve cross-modal
audio-visual generation of musical performances. We explore different encoding
methods for audio and visual signals, and work on two scenarios:
instrument-oriented generation and pose-oriented generation. Being the first to
explore this new problem, we compose two new datasets with pairs of images and
sounds of musical performances of different instruments. Our experiments using
both classification and human evaluations demonstrate that our model has the
ability to generate one modality, i.e., audio/visual, from the other modality,
i.e., visual/audio, to a good extent. Our experiments on various design choices
along with the datasets will facilitate future research in this new problem
space
Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in
building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from
using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object
recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or
even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and
performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in
crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly
human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current
engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it.
Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of
the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely
solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories
of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned;
and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and
generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete
challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the
strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive
models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary
proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar
Few-Shot Single-View 3-D Object Reconstruction with Compositional Priors
The impressive performance of deep convolutional neural networks in
single-view 3D reconstruction suggests that these models perform non-trivial
reasoning about the 3D structure of the output space. However, recent work has
challenged this belief, showing that complex encoder-decoder architectures
perform similarly to nearest-neighbor baselines or simple linear decoder models
that exploit large amounts of per category data in standard benchmarks. On the
other hand settings where 3D shape must be inferred for new categories with few
examples are more natural and require models that generalize about shapes. In
this work we demonstrate experimentally that naive baselines do not apply when
the goal is to learn to reconstruct novel objects using very few examples, and
that in a \emph{few-shot} learning setting, the network must learn concepts
that can be applied to new categories, avoiding rote memorization. To address
deficiencies in existing approaches to this problem, we propose three
approaches that efficiently integrate a class prior into a 3D reconstruction
model, allowing to account for intra-class variability and imposing an implicit
compositional structure that the model should learn. Experiments on the popular
ShapeNet database demonstrate that our method significantly outperform existing
baselines on this task in the few-shot setting
Towards the Evolution of Novel Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines
Renewable and sustainable energy is one of the most important challenges
currently facing mankind. Wind has made an increasing contribution to the
world's energy supply mix, but still remains a long way from reaching its full
potential. In this paper, we investigate the use of artificial evolution to
design vertical-axis wind turbine prototypes that are physically instantiated
and evaluated under approximated wind tunnel conditions. An artificial neural
network is used as a surrogate model to assist learning and found to reduce the
number of fabrications required to reach a higher aerodynamic efficiency,
resulting in an important cost reduction. Unlike in other approaches, such as
computational fluid dynamics simulations, no mathematical formulations are used
and no model assumptions are made.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
A dramaturgy of intermediality: composing with integrative design
The thesis investigates and develops a compositional system on intermediality in
theatre and performance as a dramaturgical practice through integrative design.
The position of the visual/sonic media in theatre and performance has been
altered by the digitalisation and networking of media technologies, which enables
enhanced dynamic variables in the intermedial processes. The emergent
intermediality sites are made accessible by developments in media technologies
and form part of broader changes towards a mediatised society: a simultaneous
shift in cultural contexts, theatre practice and audience perception.
The practice-led research is situated within a postdramatic context and develops a
system of compositional perspectives and procedures to enhance the knowledge of
a dramaturgy on intermediality. The intermediality forms seem to re-situate the
actual/virtual relations in theatre and re-construct the processes of
theatricalisation in the composition of the stage narrative. The integration of
media and performers produces a compositional environment of semiosis, where
the theatre becomes a site of narration, and the designed integration in-between
medialities emerges as intermediality sites in the performance event.
A selection of performances and theatre directors is identified, who each in distinct
ways integrate mediating technologies as a core element in their compositional
design. These directors and performances constitute a source of reflection on
compositional strategies from the perspective of practice, and enable comparative
discussions on dramaturgical design and the consistency of intermediality sites.
The practice-led research realised a series of prototyping processes situated in
performance laboratories in 2004-5. The laboratories staged investigations into
the relation between integrative design procedures and parameters for
composition of intermediality sites, particularly the relative presence in-between
the actual and the virtual, and the relative duration and distance in-between
timeness and placeness. The integration of performer activities and media
operations into dramaturgical structures were developed as a design process of
identifying the mapping and experiencing the landscape through iterative
prototyping.
The developed compositional concepts and strategies were realised in the
prototype performance Still I Know Who I Am, performed October 2006. This final
research performance was a full-scale professional production, which explored the
developed dramaturgical designs through creative practice. The performance was
realised as a public event, and composed of a series of scenes, each presenting a
specific composite of the developed integrative design strategies, and generating a
particular intermediality site.
The research processes in the performance laboratories and the prototype
performance developed on characteristics, parameters and procedures of
compositional strategies, investigating the viability of a dramaturgy of
intermediality through integrative design. The practice undertaken constitutes
raw material from which the concepts are drawn and underpins the premises for
the theoretical reflections
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