Community

To me, one of the most beautiful things with research is the nature of sharing knowledge and building communities. I’m lucky to have lots of time for reading what my fellow colleagues around the world has discovered and I feel blessed to follow in the footsteps of many great thinkers and practitioners. I also made myself a habit to write a personal email to say ”Thank you” when I read something insightful and helpful for my research. As a result I’ve already got colleagues near and far, all devoted to contribute with knowledge to the wider community of producers of interactive music.

Here are some of the articles I’ve read over the last week. A big thank you to all authors!

Michael Liebe – Interactivity and Music in Computer Games

Anthony Prechtl – Adaptive Music Generation for Computer Games

Alex Berndt – Musical Nonlinearity in Interactive Narrative Environments

Axel Berndt, Simon Waloschek, Aristotelis Hadjakos, Alexander Leemhuis – AmbiDice: An Ambient Music Interface for Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Tracy Redhead – The Interactive Music Producer

Charles P. Martin, Kai Olav Ellefsen, Jim Torresen – Deep Predictive Models in Interactive Music

 

Happy researching!

Consumer or Creator based design?

In many branches and sectors it’s a no-brainer to have a “Consumer based” design/focus/strategy etc. I have noticed it’s true even for research and development of technology for music in computer games. That probably seem to make sens for most people – developers and gamers alike – but it is often good to stop and think about the consequences.

Is the focus on the consumer always good? Is it different for different branches? Is art in general and music in particular different in this aspect? What happens to music when our focus as composers/producers/musicians moves from what we express to what the listener hears? What happens to a performance when it is edited so it has lost its original qualities? What happens to our souls when artificial intelligens satisfy our need for music?

What do we hear when we listen to AI-made music? Is it music? Or is it just vibrations in the air that tickle our souls with frequencies that is very similar to music?