Artifical Intelligence software for improvisation

C

ckorda

New member
Hello,
I'm the developer of a new MIDI performance software that makes it easier to improvise to (non-modal) chord progressions. Basically it lets you play over jazz changes (for example) by remapping the white keys to the appropriate scales in real time, though there's much more to it than that. It's not limited only to keyboards, it works with any MIDI instruments and supports ensembles. It's a free open-source project and was demoed recently at the NIME conference. Is there any interest, and if so is this the appropriate place to discuss it? I hope so!
 
You mean it transposes the notes? Most, if not all, midi controllers do this already.

No interest from me.
 
prod about to your heart's content!

cakewalkKaKed said:
sounds like great fun :D im up for a prod about
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Glad to hear it! This is a paragraph from a recent paper (NIME 2015) that explains the app pretty well:

"We sought to simplify the process of improvising to non-modal chord progressions. This led us to develop a software MIDI remapper called ChordEase that repurposes ordinary MIDI instruments by giving them new interfaces. These interfaces eliminate the need to play a different scale for each chord, the related need to play accidentals, and more generally the need to remember or even know the chord progression. ChordEase alters the pitches of notes in real time while preserving their rhythm and dynamics. Control over pitch is partially sacrificed in exchange for the freedom to approach non-modal music as if it were modal. By delegating the more computational aspects of improvisation to ChordEase, users are able to focus on other aspects, such as rhythm, dynamics, feel, group interaction, and aesthetics, even at fast tempos."

Notice that you can play a song without even knowing the chord changes! However you'll probably get better results if you do know the changes, because that familiarity lets you anticipate and use common tones in your improvisation. The real point though is that you can improvise without focusing primarily on music theory computations (or on failing to perform the computations correctly and quickly enough).

Playing changes at fast tempos normally results in significant cognitive load just to avoid obvious mistakes. Jazz players often like to unwind by playing modal music, because this temporarily relieves them of the cognitive load of following changes. ChordEase effectively makes it so that you're always playing modal music, even when you're playing changes, and this lets you play changes more freely and gesturally, i.e. you can turn your ideas and emotions directly into gestures, just as if you were playing entirely in a single key.

It also means you only have to practice melodic vocabulary in one key (C), which is a huge gain on instruments such as keyboard where each key has a different fingering; it means you only need to learn each lick once instead of twelve times. ChordEase also lets you transpose a song without relearning it--useful when accompanying singers--or transpose spontaneously while playing, just for the fun of it. And of course song complexity and tempo are no longer constraints: if you really want to play "Giant Steps" at 300 BPM, you can.

ChordEase is free and open-source. It's also fully documented and has a few hundred users so far. I enclose a screenshot of it below. So prod away, and I look forward to hearing about your experience.

chordease-main-window.png

ChordEase
 
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Seems like it would be fun to play with (or for jamming with people who don't know how to play anything), but would just encourage bad habits if used seriously.
 
lol .... in it's simplest form it would basically mean you could play ANY white key and the note would fit.

That's not improvising nor would it help you learn to improvise.

And BTW ..... I'm a jazz player/improviser and in 50 years of doing it have never heard any player want to go to modal jamming to lessen their cognitive load.

:laughings:
 
VomitHatSteve said:
but would just encourage bad habits if used seriously.
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You’re assuming that the traditional concept of musical virtuosity--direct physical control over pitch--is the only “serious” way to create improvisational music. In other words, any music not created using the traditional approach isn’t “serious” and can be disregarded. This notion is outdated, and is effectively just a personal prejudice. Music is increasingly created using indirect methods, such as sequencers, sampling, electronics, and software instruments. Traditional instrumentalists often express hostility to these new methods because they’ve invested significant time and energy in direct physical control of pitch. Nonetheless, the rapid evolution of electronic music, and the enormous variety of alternative instruments and interfaces that have accompanied that evolution, clearly demonstrate that the process of musical creation requires neither direct control of pitch nor the traditional concept of virtuosity.

Alternative methods of music creation may not require direct control of pitch, but they still require skill. Musical performance via live coding (for example) requires plenty of skill, including rapid reflexes and deep understanding of programming and synthesis. Similarly, ChordEase involves skill and requires regular practice. But more importantly, a musical technique is not an end, it's a means of achieving the goal, which is expression. Different techniques are valuable because they permit different types of expression.

Music has always co-evolved with technology. A piano is certainly a machine, as anyone who looks inside one can recognize. Modern brass instruments require sophisticated metallurgy and couldn't have been built before the industrial revolution. Even the equal-tempered chromatic scale was revolutionary in its day and doubtless had its detractors. Yet today baroque and even renaissance music coexist harmlessly with jazz, rock and techno. Implied in your comment is a kind of ideological purity, a notion that there's a "right" way to make music.

New degrees of freedom don't necessarily reduce our existing freedoms. Everyone is 100% free to not use ChordEase, or any other music technology. Cybernetics has had a huge impact on manufacturing, and doubtless made many jobs obsolete, but no one seriously equates musical performance with assembly line work. Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" notwithstanding, musicians will be some of the last people to be replaced by machines. Modern musicians routinely use drum machines, synthesizers, etc. Does this make them lazy cheaters?
 
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There's just something obviously different about consciously creating music by choosing your notes...
...and generating "accidental" sounds and then accepting them as your music "creation".
 
Lt. Bob said:
That's not improvising nor would it help you learn to improvise.
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Claiming the last word on what constitutes improvising is a type of hubris. In my experience this attitude does not result in a productive discussion.

The dismissal of cognitive load as a factor in musical performance suggests unfamiliarity with the rapidly evolving field of alternative instrument design.
 
ckorda said:
This notion is outdated, and is effectively just a personal prejudice.
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Declaring any notion outdated is a personal prejudice.
Don't take offense if people don't warm up to your product. You came to a site full of musicians. These are people who pride themselves on being musicians, so much so that they want to record their own tunes. That's what this place is.

Your product might find better traction with an audience that uses Band-in-a-Box. People who want to make music, but don't know how.
 
miroslav said:
There's just something obviously different about consciously creating music by choosing your notes...
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I also choose my notes; I just choose them in collaboration with artificial intelligence. I totally agree that my method is "different" from unaided control of pitch. It's the implication that unaided control is superior that I'm objecting to. It's a common attitude among instrumentalists for reasons discussed above, but in my view it's counterproductive. I would prefer for this thread to focus on what ChordEase has to offer to musicians who are open to creating music in collaboration with machines, as opposed to rebutting unfounded claims that any music created via such methods is inherently unworthy.
 
You're not going to stop that...no matter how "trick" you machine is. People will still have their feelings and post them.

As I said...there's an obvious difference...one is composition...and the other is artificial composition.
When you project that out...one is music...and the other is artificial music, not fully created by a person.

Iterative music synthesis is nothing new. I always found it rather gimmicky.
 
miroslav said:
As I said...there's an obvious difference..
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Apparently it's not obvious. It seems obvious to you, but that's a very different statement. From the point of view of the electronic and experimental music communities, your view would make no sense. It would be equally absurd for them to claim that music made via traditional instruments is categorically boring and worthless. Perhaps some of them do actually claim this, but in general I have found those communities to be significantly more open-minded about the definition of musicality.

But as I said previously, the creation of a new degree of freedom doesn't oblige anyone to take advantage of that freedom, nor does it eliminate or even impinge on any preexisting freedoms. You're 100% free to use or not use any particular technique in your own search for musical expression.
 
I didn't say AI music was boring and worthless...I said it was gimmicky...and I meant that from a composition perspective.

The difference comes from being able to hear the music and to know what you have and where you are going with it...VS...waiting for AI to generate something to tell you where the music is going.
Active composition VS reactive.

Sure, you can make music both ways...but don't try and sell AI music as some higher level, evolved way to compose just because you and others who use AI want to claim it as so.
 
I say "bad habits" in the same way I would say that someone who uses the Nashville number system as their sole method of transcribing music is encouraging bad habits.

It looks like a cool way to get inexpert participants involved in a musical event,* but if you never learn any of the theory of what the tool is doing, you're cheating yourself by relying on it. "Serious" music is something that has thought put into it. That thought may "What if we use few to no conventional instruments?" or "How many notes can I play in as little time as possible?" or "What - fundamentally - is a musical performance?" or "How do we make the least likable song ever?" or "How do we write the catchiest song ever?" or whatever. But if you're not putting any thought into the composition (or deconstructing composition), then you're just jamming.

I'm not saying it's a bad tool, just that I can easily picture it being used badly.

* I play my semi-procedurally-generated glitch punk. Something like this would be excellent for letting fans come up on stage and play along with the song. "Alright. Just hit the white keys in time with the music. Go!"
 
I’m interested in the word “just” in all these comments. It plays the role of a subtle pejorative. “You’re just jamming” suggests that jamming is somehow inferior, as compared to “serious” music. “Just hit the white keys in time” suggests that it would be beneath a “serious” musician to do so, yet much inspired and deservedly famous music has resulted from doing exactly that. Suppose someone plays an instrument that only supports one key, e.g. a kalimba or a harmonica. Are they “just” playing white notes? John Lee Hooker had more use for his brass toilet than for music theory, but his music is revered to this day.

Above all what I hear in these comments is a rush to dismiss years of hard work as “gimmicky” or “inexpert.” These pronouncements appear to have significant emotional energy behind them and I’m curious about the source of that. I speculate on the basis of considerable evidence that the ChordEase project is threatening to a subset of instrumental musicians--particularly jazz musicians of a certain age, say in their 50s or older--and I'm fascinated by that, because I'm also a jazz musician in my 50s, but I'm not threatened by collaborating with machines, because I've been doing it my entire life.

I started improvising in 1977, and developed the first prototype of ChordEase in 1982, when it was still necessary to build custom hardware because PCs barely existed. Today I continue to work hard to improve ChordEase because it solves my artistic problems. If it solves other people’s problems I’m happy to hear about it, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m as qualified as anyone to hold an opinion about the nature of musical expression, yet I don’t going around claiming other people’s work is “not improvising,” because to do so would be presumptuous. I might not like someone’s work, meaning it might not agree with my personal aesthetics, but that doesn’t make it invalid or unserious.
 
ckorda said:
I speculate on the basis of considerable evidence that the ChordEase project is threatening to a particular subset of instrumental musicians...
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:laughings:

They're all shaking in their boots! :p


You go ahead and keep on speculating....seems that's what you're good at. :D
 
Just read this thread. It gave me a fucking headache.

Lets all get behind this, and while we're at it let's eliminate all women for sexual pleasure too. They do have "real doll" after all. (insert sarcasm)

Nothing is like the experience of gelling in real time with real players.
Thats magic.
 
This thread has all the makings of a really good "miro vs. OP" thread.

It has the elements - disagreement on fundamental concepts, a desire to argue the point (or educate), and an OP who's convinced he/she is right about something.

Go for it miro... there's multi rep points in it for you... :D

And OP - "ChordEase"? Hire a marketer to come up with a better name for your software is my $0.02 - sort of sounds like a support garment or a drug which provides symptomatic relief for an embarrassing medical condition.:facepalm: I guess "EzyChord" is probably already taken...

Let the games begin...
 
Lemme back up a second. I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with "just jamming".
And a tool that allows inexpert - where inexpert means anything from completely untrained in music to players who just don't know the composition being played - to coherently play along with a song is cool. In that context "just hit the white keys" is exactly what you want. I've seen people use a kaos pad to similar effect: any schmo from the street can play along; knowing what you're doing helps but isn't necessary.

I'm not trying to poo-poo your hard work. I know how much of a hassle actually *programming* audio is. From your perspective, it's obviously going to a well-thought tool that has made you really think about how music works and forced you to study your theory.

From my perspective, it's a neat toy that if I could find a way to integrate it into my rig would be a good way to incorporate more crowd participation in my solo music.

There's "serious" projects where you put real thought into what you're doing and try to create Real Art(TM). Then there's playing music for fun. Neither one is inherently better. Nor are they mutually exclusive. It's just that ChordEase seems like a better tool for the latter application than the former to me.
 
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