Improvisation
Performance, 2022
This is an improvisational collaboration between humans and a robotic musician. It aims to explore the co-creativity between robots and humans and the role of a robot musician as an active listener. We bring together acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. Shimon, the robot musician, isn't just operated by humans - but also an active agent that can understand and create music. Shimon composes based on a variable-order Markov chain, which automatically adjusts the order based on the length of the input sequence, and sings and dances via a rule-based interactive system.
In collaboration with Mir Jeffres
“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”
―Johann Sebastian Bach
Counterpoint is a key compositional technique involving the interweaving of multiple independent melodic lines that composers such as J.S. Bach. In the Baroque period, improvisation was important in musical performance and education. This project aims to improvise a counterpoint with a robot musician, Shimon. In this project, Shimon will receive a four-bar melody provided by a human performer as input. Based on this input, Shimon will use a genetic algorithm to further develop this melody, and use a convolutional neural network-based approach for harmonization, which has been trained on the Bach Chorale dataset.