Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

For this CCINSERC New Media Initiative project, computer music composer Arne Eigenfeldt and artificial intelligence researcher Philippe Pasquier will collaborate to explore and define the boundaries of musical metacreation. A metacreation is software which, using aspects of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, artificial life or machine learning, displays creative behaviors; that is behaviors which would be considered creative if performed by humans. New musical metacreation software systems will be developed that extend, refine and apply techniques from the fields of artificial agents, multi-agent systems and cognitive modeling. It is expected that these systems will learn compositional and performative creative musical behaviors from both existing musical corpus and real-time interaction with performing musicians. The resulting musical metacreations will be presented publicly both nationally and internationally, in traditional concert settings, public installations, and online web releases. Furthermore, the metacreations will be objectively validated through artist and audience feedback and response to determine their musical success. This collaborative scientific and artistic research effort will advance the state of the art in the fast growing domain of entertainment computing in which software creativity and creative software are central.