Presentation at Women in Art and Technology Meetup at NOTAM – September 21, 2020

21 Sep 2020 • Anna Xambó • Post a comment

It has been a pleasure to be virtually back at NOTAM in Norway, this time to join the Online Meetup for Women in Arts and Technology September, organised by Mariam Gviniashvili and Jenny Berger Myhre.

Title: Music Performance with Crowdsourced Sounds: Collaboration by Chance

Abstract: Live coding in music is an improvisation practice based on generating code in real time. Collaborative music live coding (CMLC) typically involves a group of at least two networked live coders, who can be either co-located in the same space, distributed in different spaces, or both. Sometimes it is unpractical to collaborate with other humans. In this talk, I will discuss preliminary investigations of virtual agents (VAs) in live coding focusing on a short review of different perspectives of using VAs. I will also outline how this research connects with the EPSRC HDI Network Plus funded project that I am working at the moment "MIRLCAuto: A Virtual Agent for Music Information Retrieval in Live Coding", which looks into the use of a live coder virtual agent and the retrieval of large collections of sounds.

Summary: Today's sessions was hosted by Jenny Berger Myhre. The session was organised in three parts: a first part introducing the meetups and establishing an open discussion about expectations and hopes for the forum. A second part, where Martyna Kosecka greatly presented "Siren, Space and Balance. Music Design in Work for Five Instruments and Quadraphonic Electronics". Martyna talked about the artistic decisions related to her composition "Isorropía. In Search of Balance", which will be premiered on 23 September 2020 at the International Festival of Contemporary Music “Warsaw Autumn”. The concert will be live streamed here.

The third part was the presentation "Virtual Agents in Live Coding: Preliminary Investigations" where I presented the early works around the project "MIRLCAuto": the motivation of the project, an outline of previous work around the topic, and the formulation of the first machine learning tasks.

We discussed questions related to the differences between programmes and agents; the dimensions of social interactivity and learnability when describing the agents; how will the agent identify my musical taste; and how long does it take to train a model. All in all, it has been a fantastic experience to share the project at this stage.

The next meetup is scheduled on October 19, 7:00pm-9:00pm GMT+2 (Oslo time), don't miss it! It is the perfect platform to discuss your work-in-progress in a safe space (this as other NOTAM events are based on the Berlin Code of Conduct). See you in the next WiAT meetup!

The slides of my presentation are available here.

Acknowledgments #

Thanks to Mariam Gviniashvili and Jenny Berger Myhre for the invitation, and to NOTAM for hosting the event.

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