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If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
This chapter poses, and proposes some answers to, questions about the origins and nature of creativity when digital media takes an active role in the music-making process. The discussions are centered on François' Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation) system, which enables a musician to seed the computer with musical ideas and then improvise atop re-combinations of these ideas; the system provides the musician with visual foreknowledge of the machine's intent and review of the interaction. They extend to the different instantiations of, and extensions to, the Mimi system, which are designed with various interaction nuances in mind, and engender new forms of creativity. We review each Mimi version, from the original blue-and-white silhouette display, to the Scriabin-inspired varicolored panels, to the multi-paneled user-directed Mimi4x. In each scenario, we consider the impact of Mimi on the creative process and the resulting performance; specifically, we describe the interaction between a performer, the composer (when this is different from the performer), and the system, analyzing the techniques used to successfully negotiate a performance with Mimi, and the formal musical structures that result from this interaction 3 .
Some important theories of music cognition, such as Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983)A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, posit an archetypal listener with an ideal interpretation of musical structure, and many studies of the perception of structure focus on what different listeners have in common. However, previous experiments have revealed that listeners perceive musical structure differently, depending upon their music background and their familiarity with the piece. It is not known what other factors contribute to differences among listeners’ formal analyses, but understanding these factors may be essential to advancing our understanding of music perception.We present a case study of two listeners, with the goal of identifying the differences between their analyses, and explaining why these differences arose. These two listeners analyzed the structure of three performances, a set of improvised duets. The duets were performed by one of the listeners and Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation), a software system for human-machine improvisation. The ambiguous structure of the human-machine improvisations as well as the distinct perspectives of the listeners ensured a rich set of differences for the basis of our study.We compare the structural analyses and argue that most of the disagreements between them are attributable to the fact that the listeners paid attention to different musical features. Following the chain of causation backwards, we identify three more ultimate sources of disagreement: differences in the commitments made at the outset of a piece regarding what constitutes a fundamental structural unit, differences in the information each listener had about the performances, and differences in the analytical expectations of the listeners.
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