Ever-shifting roles in building, composing and performing with digital musical instruments

It is widely accepted that computational technologies shape the relationship of musicians, instrument builders and composers with music, affecting various socio-cultural realisms in music. In this article, I discuss in what ways music-making still emerges as a social construct, even as a result of the mutual cooperation with human musicians and AI-powered autonomous instruments. I argue that building, making, and performing with a digital musical instrument has undergone a gradual socio-technological change that has affected art, science, technology, culture and communities in general. I support my investigation through the current performance and composition practice of the autonomous AI-terity musical instrument.Peer reviewe

Evolving musical expectations: Mutual correlation between a human musician and an AI musical instrument

Peer reviewe

Towards an Experimental Platform for Collective Mobile Music Performance

(Abstract to follow

Augmented Granular Synthesis Method for GAN Latent Space with Redundancy Parameter

In this paper we introduce an augmented granular sound synthesis method for a GAN latent space exploration in audio domain. We use the AI-terity musical in- strument for sound generating events in which the neural network (NN) parameters are optimised and then the features are used as a basis to generate new sounds. The exploration of a latent space is realised by creating a latent space through the original features of the training data set and finding the corresponding audio feature of the vector points in this space. Our proposed sound synthesis method can achieve multiple audio generation and sound synthesising events simultaneously without interrupting the playback grains. To do that we introduce redundancy parameter that schedules additional buffer slots divided from a large buffer slot, allowing multiple latent space vector points to be used in granular synthesis, in GPU real-time. Our implementation demonstrates that augmented buffer schedule slots can be used as a feature for a sound synthesis methodto explore GAN-latent sound synthesis of granular-musical events with multiple generated audio samples without interrupting the granular musical features of the synthesis method.Peer reviewe

Introduction to the special issue on socio-cultural role of technology in digital musical instruments

This special issue, arising from a symposium in Helsinki in 2019, presents contributions from a diverse group of practitioners, representing a broad range of approaches in the making, thinking and writing about digital musical instruments. The authors consider the socio-cultural role of technology in current and emerging digital music practices with changing social roles, historical and critical reflections. This introduction explains the context and motivation for the issue and summarises the contribution of each of the eight articles. Together they provide what we believe is a unique contribution to the research of new interfaces for musical expression and related areas.Non peer reviewe

Composing Social Interactions for an Interactive-spatial Performance System

(Abstract to follow

GANSpaceSynth: A Hybrid Generative Adversarial Network Architecture for Organising the Latent Space using a Dimensionality Reduction for Real-Time Audio Synthesis

Generative models enable possibilities in audio domain to present timbre as vectors in a high-dimensional latent space with Gen- erative Adversarial Networks (GANs). It is a common method in GAN models in which the musician’s control over timbre is mostly limited to sampling random points from the space and interpolating between them. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid GAN architecture that allows musicians to explore the GAN latent space in a more controlled manner, identifying the audio features in the trained checkpoints and giving an opportunity to specify particular audio features to be present or absent in the generated audio samples. We extend the paper with the detailed description of our GANSpaceSynth and present the Hallu composition tool as an application of this hybrid method in computer music practices.Peer reviewe