The Playground Experiment aims at showing how a robot equipped with an intrinsic motivation system, and in particular artificial curiosity, can explore its environment autonomously and develop skills which were not pre-specified, and with an increasing complexity for an extended period of time.

Links: the homepage of the playground experiment

Participants: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Frédéric Kaplan, Verena V. Hafner and A. White

A system for collaborative musical creation on mobile wireless networks. The work extends on simple peer-to-peer file sharing systems towards ad-hoc mobility, streaming, and collaborative creation. It extends music listening from a passive act to a proactive, participative activity. The system consists of a network based interactive music engine and a mobile rendering player. It serves as a platform for experiments on studying the sense of agency in collaborative creative process, and requirements for fostering musical satisfaction in remote collaboration.

Question: How to create “interesting” audio music sequences from large collections of sound samples? The team invented the notion of musacing, by analogy with mosaicing, and explore new forms of interaction with music catalogues, such as song sampling.

The idea of musaicing is a transposition of the notion of image mosaicing to the world of audio. Musaicing makes intensive use of large databases of audio samples, and allows user to create music without having to perform the tedious and difficult task of listening and selecting individual samples. Musaicing consists in creating automatically large databases of samples by segmenting existing songs. Then metadata is computed for each sample to describe it in terms of perceptive parameters (such as timbre, percussivity, energy, pitchness, etc.). Finally the user can express high-level constraints to specify the structure and nature of a target sequence of samples. Constraints can be of various types, such as continuity (produce a sequence of samples which are continuous, timbre-wise), distribution (select a percussive sample every beat with tempo = 120) or cardinality (include at least 40% of samples which come from a Beatles song), or any combinations of these.

Media

• Interface screenshot