Presentation at Coding Literacy, Practices & Cultures Colloquia – April 29, 2021

29 Apr 2021 • Anna Xambó • Post a comment

Today, 29 March 2021, I presented on Zoom the MIRLCAuto project at the Coding Literacy, Practices & Cultures, a networked series of research colloquia organized by Dan Verständig (University of Magdeburg / Germany) and Angela Brennecke (Film University KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam Babelsberg / Germany). You can find more info about the colloquia series here.

The talk entitled "Insights into MIRLCAuto: A virtual agent for music information retrieval in live coding" has been framed to introduce the project in the context of collaborative live coding and the three Human-Data Interaction (HDI) Network Plus tenets of legibility, agency and negotiability from the angle of why legibility, agency and negotiability matter in AI-powered live coding environments. This project contributes to the HDI Network Plus Theme “Art, Music & Culture” with insight on live coding and machine learning (ML). It has been nice to reflect on the project achievements and also to outline what needs to be done before the project ends on 30th June 2021.

The three overarching HDI tenets relate to the project in the following way:

Legibility (making the processes of sharing data about a person, and others’ analysis and use of that data, comprehensible to that person): This tenet connects with the TOPLAP Manifesto and the principle of "Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens." In addition, code and processes should be clear, which the MIRLC and MIRLCa languages have as a priority.
Agency (giving a person the capacity to interact with their systems so as to control and correct the above-mentioned processes): Here the role of interactive machine learning is fundamental to enable live coders to create 'situated musical actions' (Xambó et al. 2021) that can, in turn, influence the MIRLCa system.
Negotiability (giving a person the capacity to interact with the people who do the above-mentioned analysis and use, so as to change and correct what those people do): The workshops, concerts and GitHub repository have been instrumental to promote a participatory design approach to designing the tool as an ongoing conversation.

Take-away message. The main take-away message is that there are as many approaches to machine learning and live coding as practices in live coding. To make a meaningful research/tool beyond personal use, these 3 tenets are helpful to find a versatile solution to the nature of the live coding community, which should align with open culture and DIY practices. It is also a way of bringing ML concepts to the live coding community adapted to their respective live coding environments. It is just the beginning of a promising area of research and practice.

Feedback: We had a round of Q&A at the end where we discussed interesting topics such as the legal boundaries of repurposing sound samples in live coding and thus how to properly attribute the sound samples, how live coding practices can inform educational contexts and techniques, how to get started with machine learning for music and to what extent MIRLCa has changed my practice and how.

The slides of my presentation are available here. You can find the reference list below.

Acknowledgments #

Thanks to Dan Verständig and Angela Brennecke for their invitation, to the attendees for their interest, and to the University of Magdeburg and Film University KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam Babelsberg for co-hosting the event.

Reference List #

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Collins, N. (2015). Live Coding and Machine Listening. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Live Coding (pp. 4–11). Leeds, UK: ICSRiM, University of Leeds.
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Xambó, A., Lerch, A. and Freeman, J. Music Information Retrieval in Live Coding: A Theoretical Framework. Computer Music Journal, 42:9–25, 2019.
Xambó, A., Roma, G., Lerch, A., Barthet, M. and Fazekas, G. Live Repurposing of Sounds: MIR Explorations with Personal and Crowdsourced Databases. In T. M. Luke Dahl, Douglas Bowman, editor, Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, pages 364–369, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, 2018. Virginia Tech.
Xambó, A., Roma, G., Roig, S. and Solaz, E. Live Coding with the Cloud and a Virtual Agent. In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Shanghai, China, 2021. New York University Shanghai.

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