AI Music and Folk Night

Solaris is a jazz-AI quartet that features a single human musician (well, a drummer actually). Solaris makes up the jazz improvisation in real-time, creates a bass line, and the piano solos, and adds a drum machine to spice things up for the drummer. But Solaris has never heard jazz, and is not trained on jazz music, instead it has been trained on embodied bodily data of jazz musicians improvising: their brainwaves, their arousal, their dance.

In this presentation/talk Professor Craig Vear will demonstrate the inventive power and creative potential of Solaris, have a look under the hood at the code and explain Solaris' belief system and intelligence. Overall, Solaris has been created to make humans more creative, with this in mind Vear may hint at why - given the context with which it exists - we could call Solaris 'sentient'.

Loeric is an AI that can compose and perform folk tunes. Steve is a human that can do the same. Carolan is a unique guitar that uses digital technology to capture and tell its life story. This unusual trio will perform a set of folk tunes that explore how humans and AI might interactively improvise music together. We will introduce the technology and answer questions from the audience.

Steve Benford is the Dunford Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham where he co-founded the Mixed Reality Laboratory. His research explores artistic applications of digital technologies through performance-led methods that engage artists in creating, touring and studying unique interactive experiences. In turn, these have inspired fresh perspectives on interaction such as trajectories and uncomfortable interactions. He directs the EPSRC-funded Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training and the University’s newly founded Cobot Maker Space that is exploring human interaction with robots. He was previously an EPSRC Dream Fellow. He is also a keen musician.

Loeric has been developed by my collaborators Marco Amerotti and Bob Sturm of the Royal institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, and Craig Vear of the University of Nottingham.