The informatics philharmonic

Abstract

I present ongoing work in developing a system that accompanies a live musician in a classical concerto-type setting, providing a flexible ensemble the follows the soloist in real-time and adapts to the soloist's interpretation through rehearsal. An accompanist must hear the soloist. The program models hearing through a hidden Markov model that can accurately and reliably parse highly complex audio in both offline and online fashion. The probabilistic formulation allows the program to navigate the latency/accuracy tradeoff in online following, so that onset detections occur with greater latency (and greater latency) when local ambiguities arise. For music with a sense of pulse, coordination between parts must be achieved by anticipating future evolution. The program develops a probabilistic model for musical timing, a Bayesian Belief Network, that allows the program to anticipate where future note onsets will occur, and to achieve better prediction using rehearsal data. The talk will include a live demonstration of the system on a staple from the violin concerto repertoire, as well as applications to more forward-looking interactions between soloist and computer controlled instruments.