The idea of this project is to create an intelligent musical instrument that can predict human musical interactions to help them create music. This work involves encapsulating machine learning models of creative interaction into a playable instrument.
The challenge here is not just to create a ML model, but to build it into an interactive system that might be useful for a musician or just a curious and creative human!
As part of this project, you will conceptualise, create, and evaluate a musical system. You’ll need to be comfortable learning new languages and should enjoy working with physical hardware. It would be advantageous to have taken Sound and Music Computing or Human-Computer Interaction.
One focus of this project is to use the Bela Gem platform, an embedded computer for interactive art based on the Beaglebone platform that has been used for many creative new musical systems.
We have a (brand new) Bela Gem Multi board with 8 outputs. We also have an 8-channel audio system at our sub-SMCClab at the ANU School of Music. Ideally you get to play with both things!
You can take inspiration from some of our previous intelligent musical instruments that you can see here.
For an Honours/master project we would expect you to create a working prototype that includes an ML model and enables interactive sound or music to be created. You would need to complete some type of formal evaluation. This project could also be the basis of a wider PhD project.
Please read information about joining the Sound, Music, and Creative Computing Lab before applying for this project.
How to Apply
To apply for this project, contact Charles Martin.
Include:
- your CV
- your unofficial transcript (if you are an ANU student)
- a brief statement (200 words) in your email explaining how you would approach this project
Make sure to specify the skills and accomplishments you have that would help you to complete this project.
Useful Papers and Resources:
- Understanding Musical Predictions With an Embodied Interface for Musical Machine Learning
- Performing with a Generative Electronic Music Controller
- An Interactive Musical Prediction System with Mixture Density Recurrent Neural Networks
- A Physical Intelligent Instrument using Recurrent Neural Networks
- Vigliensoni et al. A small-data mindset for generative AI creative work