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Home > News & Publications > News > 2006 > L'Informatique Musicale Subject of First Viterbi Early Career Chair Lectures
L'Informatique Musicale Subject of First Viterbi Early Career Chair Lectures
Elaine Chew Hosts Three-Day Event Featuring Music Composition and Improvisation Software Creator
March 27, 2006 —
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Elaine Chew |
Three days of
presentations, lectures and demonstrations by Gerard Assayag, from
IRCAM, the renowned Paris center for scientific research in music and
information technology, will begin April 4 and run through April 6.
Elaine Chew of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of
Industrial and Systems Engineering, the first USC Viterbi Early Career
Chairholder, organized the event, Chew, a concert pianist who has been
researching engineering applications and machine understandings of
music for years, invited Assayag's participation.
The sponsors include the Early Career Chair program, the Epstein
Department of Industrial and Systems Design, and the Integrated Media
Systems Center.
All presentations are free and open to the public. The schedule:
- DEMONSTRATION: TUE, April 4, 2006, 12:30PM - 1:30PM, MacDonald Recital Hall (MUS 106) "Improvising with the Computer using OMax, a Statistical Learning Environment" This
demonstration features OMax, a machine improvization system designed by
Assayag and M. Chemillier, in concert with Dennis Thurmond, director of
keyboard pedagogy at the Thornton School of Music. Machine learning of
musical style uses statistical modeling of melodies or polyphonies to
recreate variants of musical examples. When the learning process is
performed on the fly by "listening" to a musician play and the
generation itself may happen in the same time, as will be demonstrated
in this session, then a real-time man/machine improvisation experience
becomes possible. The OMax system consists of a hybrid architecture
that combines two popular composition/perfomance environments formerly
designed at IRCAM: OpenMusic (by G. Assayag and C. Agon) and Max (a
real time environment created by M. Puckette and D. Zicarelli). These
two subsystems operate at different time scales, and communicate
together in a way that evokes the well known working memory / longterm
memory paradigm, so that the resulting improvisation experience is not
restricted to instantaneous action-reaction processes. As the digital
partner learns from its music master, a sort of clone emerges that
recombines material extracted from the past, while maintaining a
certain stylistic consistency. The performer thus plays with a
distorted self recalled from past moments in what could be called a
"stylistic feed-back" loop.
- LECTURE: WED, April 5, 2006, 2:30PM - 4:00PM, GER309 "Computer Assisted Composition at IRCAM: the OpenMusic environment "
This lecture provides a general introduction to computer assisted
composition research at IRCAM, with a special focus on the OpenMusic
(OM) project. The OM visual programming environment was designed at
IRCAM by Assayag and C. Agon to help composers set up the programs
necessary to prepare complex music material structured by rules of
their own construction. OM brings an experimental dimension to the
compositional activity. By providing a description of some
characteristics of a musical process, either in a formal, algorithmic
or even purely graphical way, the composer gets a model of music
material, both out-of- and in-time. The model can then be simulated for
the purpose of verifying hypotheses, observing emerging behaviours, and
finally generating and archiving effective material for the
composition. As composition is, among other definitions, a "synthesis
of time", various time structures are made available: global time,
local time, and logical time. These structures may be defined in a
graphical way and interact in order to build complex formal
organizations, where musical parts in the piece may exist in functional
or logical relations one to another. This leads to a renewed concept of
the "score", which now becomes a dynamic network of interrelated
musical components, making it easy for generating and testing new
musical ideas.
- WORKSHOP: THU, April 6, 2006, 2:30PM - 4:00PM, GER306 "OpenMusic and OMax"
This workshop will provide a practical introduction to OpenMusic (OM).
OM is a visual programming language based on CommonLisp / CLOS. OM is
icon oriented, uses extensively drag-and-drop, and has built-in visual
control structures that interface with Lisp ones, such as the loop. OM
Projects live above the OM kernel; a project is a specialized set of
classes and methods directly written in Lisp, accessible and
visualizable in the OM environment. OM may be used as a general purpose
functional/object/visual programming language. At a more specialized
level, a set of classes and libraries make it a very convenient
environment for music composition. Objects are symbolized by icons, and
most operations are performed by dragging an icon from a particular
place and dropping it to another place. Numerous examples of classes
implementing musical data/behaviour will be provided. These classes are
associated with graphical editors, and can be readily extended by the
user to meet specifical needs. Different representations of a musical
process are handled, among them common notation, MIDI, piano-roll, and
sound signal. High-level in-time organization of the music material is
proposed through the maquette concept. The session concludes with a
description of OMax, the machine improvisation system built on OM and
Max (the real time environment by M. Puckette and D. Zicarelli).
Gerard Assayag is currently head of the Music Representation Research Group at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de
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Gerard Assayag |
Coordination
Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, and Directeur de Recherches Associa for
the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).
Born in 1960, he studied computer science, music and linguistics. In
1980, while still a student, he won research awards in "Art and the
Computer", a national software contest launched in 1980 by the French
Ministry of Research, and another one in the "Concours Micro," a
contest in computing in the arts using early micro-computers.
In the mid-eighties, he wrote the first IRCAM environment for
score-oriented Computer Assisted Composition. In the mid-nineties he
created, with Carlos Agon, the OpenMusic environment which is currently
used by numerous composers and musicologists around the world. The
concept behind OpenMusic is to provide a visual counterpart of major
programming paradigms (such as functional, object and logical
programming) along with an extensive set of musical classes and
methods, plus an original metaphor for representing musical time in its
logical, as well as chronological, aspects. OpenMusic is now taught in
several prestigious universities and institutions such as Columbia,
Harvard, IRCAM, Conservatoire de Paris, Technischen Universität Berlin,
University of Wisconsin, University of Cincinnati, and the Sibelius
Academy in Finland.
He is currently in charge of ATIAM, an MS/PhD program in Acoustics,
Signal Processing, and Computer Science Applied to Music. ATIAM is
co-organized by IRCAM , Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, and Telecom
Paris. Created twelve years ago, ATIAM has produced graduated
approximately eighty PhD's in computer music, signal processing,
acoustics and psychoacoustics. His research interests center on music
representation issues, and include computer language paradigms, machine
learning, constraint and visual programming, computational musicology,
music modeling, and computer-assisted composition. His research results
are regularly published in proceedings, books and journals.
Assayag is a founding member of the AFIM (Association Francaise
d'Informatique Musicale), and member of the FWO Society on Foundations
of Music Research. He has organized the "Forum Diderot, Mathematique et
Musique" for the European Mathematical Society in 1999 (published as a
book by Springer Verlag 2001) as well as several international computer
music conferences, including the Sound and Music Computing 2004
conference, which included a preceding international workshop/concert
on improvisation with the computer. Recently, he has participated in
the founding of The Journal of Mathematics and Music project, whose
affiliates come from institutions such as IRCAM, Yale University, and
the Eastman School of Music.
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Depiction of improvisation using OMax, by Martin Lartigues |
His
recent papers with his co-authors include "Using Factor Oracles for
Machine Improvisation" in Soft Computing, "Using Machine-Learning
Methods for Musical Style Modeling" in IEEE Computer, "Computer
Assisted Composition at IRCAM : PatchWork & OpenMusic" in the
Computer Music Journal, and "Mathematics and Music, A Diderot
Mathematical Forum" published by Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
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