Adaptive Elusion

Palle Dahlstedt

Adaptive Elusion
Image credit: Palle Dahlstedt

Abstract:

A continuation of my experiments with minimal algorithms, investigating how small an interactive musical algorithm can be and still invoke the feeling of “somebody there”. Here, a small set of adaptive algorithms react to a live pianist, trying to imitate, elude and counteract his playing, while at the same time being completely dependent on it as a source of patterns and sounds. The piece explores real-time training as a primary modus of interaction, in a cat-and-mouse game of sorts. It is also an example of what I call entangled musicianship. What the pianist plays is a reaction to what the algorithm plays, and at the same time shapes the future playing of the algorithm, hence entangling performance and control. The musical response is generated by a small machine-learning algorithm that starts empty and is trained in real-time on what I am playing. It can also gradually forget what it has learnt.