In a Silent Way: Communication Between AI and Improvising Musicians Beyond Sound
Abstract
Collaboration is built on trust, and establishing trust with a creative Artificial Intelligence is difficult when the decision process or internal state driving its behaviour isn't exposed. When human musicians improvise together, a number of extra-musical cues are used to augment musical communication and expose mental or emotional states which affect musical decisions and the effectiveness of the collaboration. We developed a collaborative improvising AI drummer that communicates its confidence through an emoticon-based visualisation. The AI was trained on musical performance data, as well as real-time skin conductance, of musicians improvising with professional drummers, exposing both musical and extra-musical cues to inform its generative process. Uni- and bi-directional extra-musical communication with real and false values were tested by experienced improvising musicians. Each condition was evaluated using the FSS-2 questionnaire, as a proxy for musical engagement. The results show a positive correlation between extra-musical communication of machine internal state and human musical engagement.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.06442,
title = {In a Silent Way: Communication Between AI and Improvising Musicians Beyond Sound},
author = {Jon McCormack and Toby Gifford and Patrick Hutchings and Maria Teresa Llano Rodriguez and Matthew Yee-King and Mark d'Inverno},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.06442},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
11 pages, accepted at ACM CHI 2019, Glasgow Scotland, UK 4-9 May 2019