Sequential decision making in artificial musical intelligence

Over the past 60 years, artificial intelligence has grown from a largely academic field of research to a ubiquitous array of tools and approaches used in everyday technology. Despite its many recent successes and growing prevalence, certain meaningful facets of computational intelligence have not been as thoroughly explored. Such additional facets cover a wide array of complex mental tasks which humans carry out easily, yet are difficult for computers to mimic. A prime example of a domain in which human intelligence thrives, but machine understanding is still fairly limited, is music. Over the last decade, many researchers have applied computational tools to carry out tasks such as genre identification, music summarization, music database querying, and melodic segmentation. While these are all useful algorithmic solutions, we are still a long way from constructing complete music agents, able to mimic (at least partially) the complexity with which humans approach music. One key aspect which hasn't been sufficiently studied is that of sequential decision making in musical intelligence. This thesis strives to answer the following question: Can a sequential decision making perspective guide us in the creation of better music agents, and social agents in general? And if so, how? More specifically, this thesis focuses on two aspects of musical intelligence: music recommendation and human-agent (and more generally agent-agent) interaction in the context of music. The key contributions of this thesis are the design of better music playlist recommendation algorithms; the design of algorithms for tracking user preferences over time; new approaches for modeling people's behavior in situations that involve music; and the design of agents capable of meaningful interaction with humans and other agents in a setting where music plays a roll (either directly or indirectly). Though motivated primarily by music-related tasks, and focusing largely on people's musical preferences, this thesis also establishes that insights from music-specific case studies can also be applicable in other concrete social domains, such as different types of content recommendation. Showing the generality of insights from musical data in other contexts serves as evidence for the utility of music domains as testbeds for the development of general artificial intelligence techniques. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the overall usefulness of taking a sequential decision making approach in settings previously unexplored from this perspectiveComputer Science

Designing an orrery of the universe: the creation of new chamber music through algorithmic composition

The main focus of my research has been to investigate a number of ways to extend my practice as a composer. In response to a detailed analysis of the technical means and aesthetic intentions of my music during the decade preceding this research (a music fundamentally derived from Hebrew language and grammatical structures), together with consideration of broader cultural trends in 20th century musical modernism, I have designed a detailed process for creating ambitious musical works. This process has been explored in the composition of two chamber music projects - a flute solo and a piano trio - both of which are documented as musical scores and audio recordings. Computer technology is utilized at a number of key points: the melodic life of the projects is characterized by the development of themes through the agency of six discrete transformational algorithms, all of which can be applied simultaneously and independently controlled. This aspect of the process was achieved using IRCAM’s software Openmusic and a rhythmic search engine of my own design. The success of these projects is considered against the principles that informed their creation and through expert peer responses and critical reception. The exegesis concludes with a detailed list of possible future directions for musical composition, some of which extend and refine the role of algorithms, and some that propose diametrically opposed strategies that respond to some probable limits of algorithmic composition I have identified through this research

Sonic Perceptual Ecologies: Strategies for sound-­based exploration,perception and composition in spaces of transient encounters.

This thesis contributes a novel, cross-­‐disciplinary framework to the field of sound studies. It examines how our inherent capacities as listeners are manifested in transitional urban environments, and the primary role of voice as a vehicle for perception in field recording and soundwalking practices. Using the conceptual triad of ‘node, counter-­atmosphere and meshwork’ as its analytical device, this research considers the polyphonic physical, personal and social ecologies at play in our encounters within transitional spaces. By doing so, it highlights the importance of sound for countering their functionality and opening them up to a more engaged perception. In its theoretical scope, this conceptual triad draws on and re-­contextualises existing terminologies from a variety of disciplines: urban planning and Kevin Lynch’s notion of the node; philosophy and Gernot Boehme’s theory on the atmosphere as well as Gaston Bachelard’s concept of seeping through; anthropology and Tim Ingold’s idea of the meshwork. Coined as a sonic perceptual ecology, this triad is a new analytical tool that is the immediate result of the practice developed as part of this research. Involving three consecutive stages, the work spans across intensive fieldwork, workshops, hybrid telematic soundwalks, radioart pieces, public events and performances engaging with different sites in London and elsewhere. This thesis presents a constellation of original outputs, essential to creating and understanding the novel conceptual framework of the sonic perceptual ecology. This is achieved by testing new methodologies, by analysing, in new terms and through the 'Sensing Cities' interviews series, existing creative work and by developing a portfolio of practice that has been presented as part of commissions, conferences and curated events. Key to these activities is the proposition that we perceive not as authoritative presences but as organisms whose voice is, as Mikhail Bakhtin would suggest, a chain of human and non-­‐human utterances

The grain of the digital audio workstation

This thesis explores the material conditions and practices of the digital audio workstation (DAW), treating them as a subject of musical composition. The DAW is a software application currently ubiquitous in facilitating the creation of recorded and electronic music. Despite its prominence, few have articulated its unique possibilities for compositional practice, or historically contextualised the emergence of such practices. To clarify the locus of inquiry, a theoretical framework termed the grain of the DAW is developed. Derived primarily from Roland Barthes’ notion of the grain (1977), it is understood as the sonic effects in a recorded musical work that infer the unique material conditions and practices associated with a sonic medium. It is argued that compositional techniques can foreground or conceal this grain, the latter of which is more common in many musical traditions. Employing practice-led research strategies and methods derived from experimental electronic music, compositional techniques that foreground the grain of the DAW are investigated, culminating in an album entitled Thru, the creative component of this thesis. Composition in this mode involves negotiating between sound design, arrangement, mixing, critical listening, data organisation, and managing conceptual burden (Duignan, 2008). It also involves situating the DAW as a socially constructed technology (Sterne, 2012; Pinch & Bijker, 2012), promoting individualised musical practice and mobilising several metaphors that articulate this condition

Structure out of sound

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1993.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-170).Michael Jerome Hawley.Ph.D

Violin Augmentation Techniques for Learning Assistance

PhDLearning violin is a challenging task requiring execution of pitch tasks with the left hand using a strong aural feedback loop for correctly adjusting pitch, concurrent with the right hand moving a bow precisely with correct pressure across strings. Real-time technological assistance can help a student gain feedback and understanding helpful for learning and maintaining motivation. This thesis presents real-time low-cost low-latency violin augmentations that can be used to assist learning the violin along with other real-time performance tasks. To capture bow performance, we demonstrate a new means of bow tracking by measuring bow hair de ection from the bow hair being pressed against the string. Using near- eld optical sensors placed along the bow we are able to estimate bow position and pressure through linear regression from training samples. For left hand pitch tracking, we introduce low cost means for tracking nger position and illustrate the combination of sensed results with audio processing to achieve high accuracy low-latency pitch tracking. We subsequently verify our new tracking methods' e ectiveness and usefulness demonstrating low-latency note onset detection and control of real-time performance visuals. To help tackle the challenge of intonation, we used our pitch estimation to develop low latency pitch correction. Using expert performers, we veri ed that fully correcting pitch is not only disconcerting but breaks a violinist's learned pitch feedback loop resulting in worse asplayed performance. However, partial pitch correction, though also linked to worse as-played performance, did not lead to a signi cantly negative experience con rming its potential for use to temporarily reduce barriers to success. Subsequently, in a study with beginners, we veri ed that when the pitch feedback loop is underdeveloped, automatic pitch correction did not signi cantly hinder performance, but o ered an enjoyable low-pitch error experience and that providing an automatic target guide pitch was helpful in correcting performed pitch error

The 'War on Terror' metaframe in film and television

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the government of the United States of America declared a ‘War on Terror’. This was targeted not only at the ostensible culprits – al-Qaeda - but at ‘terror’ itself. The ‘War on Terror’ acted as a rhetorical ‘metaframe’, which was sufficiently flexible to incorporate a broad array of nominally-related policies, events, phenomena and declarations, from the Iraq war to issues of immigration. The War on Terror is strategically limitless, and therefore incorporates not only actual wars, but potential wars. For example, the bellicose rhetoric towards those countries labelled the ‘Axis of Evil’ or ‘Outposts of Tyranny’ is as much a manifestation of the metaframe as the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Baghdad. As a rhetorical frame, it is created through all of its utterances; its narrative may have been initially scripted by the Bush administration, but it is reified and naturalised by the news media and other commentators, who adopt the frame’s language even when critical of its content. Moreover, film and television texts participate in this process, with fiction-based War on Terror narratives sharing and supporting – co-constituting – the War on Terror discourse’s ‘reality’. This thesis argues that the War on Terror metaframe manifests itself in multiple interconnected narrative forms, and these forms both transcode and affect its politics. I propose a congruency between the frame’s expansiveness and its associational interconnections, and a corresponding cinematic plot-structure I term the Global Network Narrative. Elsewhere, an emphasis on the pressures of clock-time is evoked by the real-time sequential-series 24, while the authenticity and authority implied by the embedded ‘witness’ is shown to be codified and performed in multiple film and television fiction texts. Throughout, additional contextual influences – social, historical, and technological – are introduced where appropriate, so as not to adopt the metaframe’s claims of limitlessness and uniqueness, while efforts are made to address film and television not as mutually exclusive areas of study, but as suggestively responsive to one another