GenBebop
GenBebop is a project directed by Lee
Spector that involves the use of genetic programming
to produce interactive jazz music-making programs. This
page contains links to output from evolved music-making
programs and references to publications with more
information on the project.
Output from GenBebop
These sounds are recordings of
interactions between Lee Spector and a simple
"constructed jazz musician." The constructed
jazz musician was evolved using genetic programming
techniques. See [Spector & Alpern 1994] for details;
the paper also contains a discussion of the overall
"artist construction" framework; other
applications of this framework are in progress.
The constructed jazz musician that was
used for these recordings produces a 4-measure
"response" to a 4-measure "call"
provided by a human. In these recordings the human input
was via guitar and pitch-to-MIDI translation (using a
Roland CP-40); the responses were produced on a Kurzweil
K2000 using a trumpet sound. (It sounds better at full
resolution!) The recordings were edited to remove short
processing lags between calls and responses. The
"medley" is just a bunch of illustrative
call/response pairs glued together.
The constructed musician's responses
are not brilliant; they are, however, judged to be good
by the "music critic" that assessed fitness in
the evolutionary process that produced the musician. We
believe that better musicians will result from the use
of better critics; one of our current projects is to
test this hypothesis by improving the critics. A paper
on the use of neural network critics in the GenBebop
framework is also available [Spector & Alpern 1995].
The sounds
One trade-4 interaction: What
would Charlie Parker think? (115kb). Or check out
the longer GenBebop
Medley (565kb) that was played at AAAI-94.
References
[Spector & Alpern 1995] Spector,
L., and A. Alpern. 1995. Induction and Recapitulation of
Deep Musical Structure. In Working Notes of the IJCAI-95
Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Music. pp.
41-48. (postscript,
615k)
[Spector & Alpern 1994] Spector,
L., and A. Alpern. 1994. Criticism, Culture, and the
Automatic Generation of Artworks. In Proceedings of the
Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
AAAI-94, pp. 3-8. Menlo Park, CA and Cambridge, MA: AAAI
Press/The MIT Press.
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