Soloist with computer accompaniment

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briandc
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Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by briandc »

An interesting pdf artice about the use of computer intelligence to accompany, in this particular case, a soloist: here

Any thoughts/reflections?

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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by raboof »

briandc wrote:An interesting pdf artice about the use of computer intelligence to accompany, in this particular case, a soloist: here

Any thoughts/reflections?
I think this is super interesting, and indeed for the 'non-improvised' case that this article covers it sounds fairly doable. One consideration is that the accompaniment often also acts as a 'beacon'/'guide' for the soloist, so it'd have to be tuned to respond 'unpredictably enough' to be interesting, but not 'too unpredicatable', especially when the soloist 'loses his thread' and needs the accompaniment the most.

Of course applying this to improvised music is where this gets *really* interesting ;).
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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by briandc »

Yes, I agree that improvision might require more advanced capabilities.!
Yet, as a friend of mine pointed out earlier today, "intuition is not logic." Perhaps something that computers will never attain to... Can a computer be "inspired??"


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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by jonetsu »

It might very well be that for us inspiration is already not well defined. How can it be for a computer ? Once we can quantify and describe accurately the reasons for which we can say "this playing is inspired" then the computer can learn what it is and can eventually come up with a playing that will sound inspired to us mere mortals.

Will it be that the computer will be inspired on its own ? What were then doing the two computers at google or facebook that had to be switched off because they devised between themselves a way of communicating that couldn't be understood ? We're they off on an inspiration run ?
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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by CrocoDuck »

When I learned how to improvise, quoting my guitar teacher, I built a "vocabulary of musical phrases", to use to build "sentences", and, overall, a "story". I learned by listening to others, both consciously (wow! this dude is amazing! let me understand what is he doing) and unconsciously (wow, I like this solo I invented... oh wait, it is similar to this one I used to listen a lot to, 3 years ago...).

Machine Learning is one of the most important sub-disciplines of AI. If a human can learn how to build a musical vocabulary from others, essentially through learning by observation and imitation (plus small personal changes), so in theory a machine can learn such thing too. If you look at it, the way one human builds a musical vocabulary is by exposure to other's music. Exposure to data is what trains machines too. In this paradigm, there is no need to model, or even define, inspiration in any explicit terms. If the data are rich enough, the machine will be able to copy the correlation between signal features and subjective feeling of "listening to inspired music". After all, similar things are already starting happening in natural language processing, and machines are getting able to understand if one's tone is sarcastic, or sad (for example).

As for intuition not being logic, I strongly disagree. In my life I use plenty of intuition. Intuition is understanding the coarse relationship between things, and it happens on the substrate of logical thinking, whether you realize or not. For example, you might have the intuition of playing slightly ahead of time at a gig. It comes from the fact that you learned the effect it produces, and you see fit in the current conditions to propose that effect. It is "on-the-fly" reasoning: I hear what the band does, I know (from experience) that playing slightly ahead of time in this conditions can give the feeling (say) of tension, Hence I go for it. This might as well be unconscious, that is, the conditions make you recall the technique/expedient without you realizing it.
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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by briandc »

CrocoDuck wrote: As for intuition not being logic, I strongly disagree. In my life I use plenty of intuition. Intuition is understanding the coarse relationship between things, and it happens on the substrate of logical thinking, whether you realize or not. For example, you might have the intuition of playing slightly ahead of time at a gig. It comes from the fact that you learned the effect it produces, and you see fit in the current conditions to propose that effect. It is "on-the-fly" reasoning: I hear what the band does, I know (from experience) that playing slightly ahead of time in this conditions can give the feeling (say) of tension, Hence I go for it. This might as well be unconscious, that is, the conditions make you recall the technique/expedient without you realizing it.
I've been reflecting on this for a couple of days now. On one hand, I think I understand where you are coming from as far as something like "learned conclusions" based on previous experience. I think that intuition is sort of more akin to inspiration than to logic, however. WordReference kind of supports this idea: Intuition

"direct perception of truth, fact, etc. independent of any reasoning process"... Computers/software are only as intelligent as their makers/programmers/designers. They *must* follow a logical sequence, whereas man doesn't have to. Ideas/inspiration can come to man without logical sequences. I think intuition is along these lines as well. At least I do for now. :D


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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by raboof »

briandc wrote:Computers/software are only as intelligent as their makers/programmers/designers. They *must* follow a logical sequence, whereas man doesn't have to.
When you get into details, this is not as clear-cut as it may seem.

We have a fairly good idea of how the brain works, at the "atoms-and-electrical-charges" level, and can explain a lot of how we make decisions in these terms. Looking at that level, it's pretty hard to tell whether we have a 'soul'/'consciousness' that is outside of the "atoms-and-electrical-charges" we understand. It "feels like" we "should have", but it's not so clear how those levels would interact. So it might in fact be that what we think of as a 'soul'/'consciousness' does not exist outside the "atoms-and-electrical-charges" level, but instead emerges from the complicated-but-understood "atoms-and-electrical-charges" themselves.

If that is true, it's entirely conceivable that a sufficiently powerful computer could 'simulate' a brain, complete with 'soul'/'consciousness'. Of course this will be a long way off for a human brain, but http://www.openworm.org/ is interesting in this context.

Attacked from the other side, it's true that rigid "if-then-else" programming structures lead to solutions that are "only as intelligent as their makers/programmers/designers". However, when you start introducing data streams of either random or 'interesting' data into your program, it *can* start behaving in 'interesting' ways, and this allows a 'feedback loop' where by observing your programs' behavior and making tweaks to it based on that, you're arguably going beyond "only as intelligent as their makers/programmers/designers". https://poster.nordik.org/ is a fun thing I came across recently, which is still rather constrained but starts to give a taste of this interaction. Think of it like tweaking the settings on a synth: you have full control over its knobs, but finding the nice sounds is a process of listening and experimenting. When working with more "AI" techniques (like neural nets) this concept is amplified further.

Now, I'm not ready to proclaim that we humans are just messy deterministic robots or that software can have a soul/consciousness, but perhaps the line is blurry enough that we can in fact have software that is unpredictable enough (but not *too* unpredictable) to give some interesting results here.
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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by jonetsu »

briandc wrote:Computers/software are only as intelligent as their makers/programmers/designers. They *must* follow a logical sequence, whereas man doesn't have to.
So where was the logical sequence coming from that made those two AI computers at google/facebook create their own encrypted conversation exchange that prompted engineers to shut them off since they were not able to understand them ? Maybe they found it logic to encrypt their 'conversation' like we find it logic to encrypt ours.
raboof wrote:We have a fairly good idea of how the brain works, at the "atoms-and-electrical-charges" level, and can explain a lot of how we make decisions in these terms. Looking at that level, it's pretty hard to tell whether we have a 'soul'/'consciousness' that is outside of the "atoms-and-electrical-charges" we understand. It "feels like" we "should have", but it's not so clear how those levels would interact. So it might in fact be that what we think of as a 'soul'/'consciousness' does not exist outside the "atoms-and-electrical-charges" level, but instead emerges from the complicated-but-understood "atoms-and-electrical-charges" themselves.
At least not with the current understanding of 'atoms and electrical charges' and the rough limitation that such a notion, eg. that nothing else exists out of these two, can bring along.

We are largely robots. In a pretty high percentage. When we feel something, it's most of the time a robot reaction. But we must cling to something to we think consider then as feelings, as an expression of our souls. It gives reassurance. When those feelings are not blatantly manipulated (by the media, by an orchestra of events, politicians, etc, etc ... we all agree that oil is a very important resource but the minds of masses and ultimately of individual components of those masses is at par in importance so that there's no air of dictatorship floating around which would be detrimental to the beliefs in Democracy (TM) and Liberty (TM)).
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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by CrocoDuck »

briandc wrote:I think that intuition is sort of more akin to inspiration than to logic, however. WordReference kind of supports this idea: Intuition

"direct perception of truth, fact, etc. independent of any reasoning process"...
Aw yeah. I think I am a bit biased maybe by the meaning that intuition has in disciplines like Physics and Mathematics. On one hand, mainly in Physics, it means rule of thumb reasoning. Fermi Questions are a good example of this. In Mathematical Philosophy Intuitionism it has the meaning of "human creation of knowledge" essentially. In this regard, I tend to group into Intuition any mental output of human beings. And if you think about, every output you have has some degree of built-in logic.

For example, Band in a Box is able to generate solos since 2005, I think. My guitar teacher used to play with that. It would make solos, back then, that were essentially random time figures of random notes that would fit into the chords. On one hand, it could came up with ideas that were interesting, and my teacher would steal those. On the other, it was largely unstructured and not very musical.

In contrast, your solos probably fit in a reasonable, even if maybe not 100% analytical and regular, time division and tonal organization. It is hard for our brain to be a random generator, really hard. I think logic is an instinct, a deep core one.
briandc wrote:Computers/software are only as intelligent as their makers/programmers/designers.
This is getting less true for modern AI systems, which are generic programs which, given a dataset, learn to map its properties to variables of interest. For example, facial recognition is not explicitly programmed. A neural network is trained on pictures until it becomes able to do so.

I written about a similar topic on my blog: https://thecrocoduckspond.wordpress.com ... computers/
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Re: Soloist with computer accompaniment

Post by CrocoDuck »

I found this video online which has very good examples of AI composition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J5bDQHQR1g

I don't quite agree that AI will turn humans obsolete though, for various reasons, in contrast to the tone of the video.
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