Piano Genie

We present Piano Genie, an intelligent controller which allows non-musicians to improvise on the piano. With Piano Genie, a user performs on a simple interface with eight buttons, and their performance is decoded into the space of plausible piano music in real time. To learn a suitable mapping procedure for this problem, we train recurrent neural network autoencoders with discrete bottlenecks: an encoder learns an appropriate sequence of buttons corresponding to a piano piece, and a decoder learns to map this sequence back to the original piece. During performance, we substitute a user's input for the encoder output, and play the decoder's prediction each time the user presses a button. To improve the intuitiveness of Piano Genie's performance behavior, we impose musically meaningful constraints over the encoder's outputs.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ACM IUI 201

Salzedo Remembered, October 21, 1984

This is the concert program of the Salzedo Remembered performance on Sunday, October 21, 1984 at 3:00 p.m., at the Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were Prelude to Olaf Bolm by Carlos Salzedo, Énigme by C. Salzedo, To Marya Freund by C. Salzedo, Piece concertante, Op. 27 by C. Salzedo, Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé by C. Salzedo, Sonata for Harp and Piano by C. Salzedo, Arpeggina- Toys: Suite for Harp Ensemble by John Goodman, Volute et Rondel by C. Salzedo, Ballade by C. Salzedo, and Childrens' Corner by Claude Debussy, transcribed by C. Salzedo. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Practice Makes Perfect: On Professional Standards

Practicing is a matter of increasing the reliability of ones skills rather than relying on a tool or a strike of genius to get it right. Once perfection has been achieved the individual will aim for higher quality since the effort is more likely to be worthwhile. Furthermore because the returns to achieving perfection are higher the harder it is to achieve, the perfectionist equilibrium only arises in situations where genius is rare and reliability is low. From this follows that as tools improve, even though perfection then has become easier to achieve, professional standards may nonetheless decline. This mechanism is captured in an oligopoly model, where the failure rate and the quality are endogenously determined

The Sound of Soul: Biofeedback Controlled Music Generation and Sound Design

The aim of this project is to develop a system that allows biofeedback to be used as a creative musical tool through music generation and sound design. This system uses brainwave data from an electroencephalogram, as well as electromyography muscle activity. This biofeedback is then interpreted by a machine learning neural network which can be trained to classify the user’s psychological or physiological state. This determination will then be used to control a generative Artificial Intelligent MIDI generator or other MIDI Continuous Controller signals. The raw biofeedback, averaged brainwave amplitudes, and Fast Fourier Transform of the EEG signal can also be used to control MIDI generation and Digital Audio Workstation parameters directly, and for synthesizer generation and timbral control.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1280/thumbnail.jp