Unity in Diversity is a duet between a human performer and a computer, where the human plays a keyboard synthesizer and the computer software listens, analyses, and responds in real time. This performance, utilising the Controlling Interactive Music (CIM) system, co-developed by myself, Toby Gifford and Andrew Sorensen, combines “conversational” interaction with “inter-part elision,” creating a dynamic interplay between independent musical agency and cohesive ensemble unity. The duet performance explores how the human and computer components can interact musically while maintaining a sense of individual creativity and a unified musical outcome.
This performance is part of an integrated practice-led research process, with the theory, software development, composition, and performance all carried out by the same research team. It investigates how autonomous musical agents can exhibit independent creative capacity, behaviour, and intent, contributing to a unified yet diverse musical experience. The work also serves as a demonstration and evaluation of the CIM software, which implements a novel interactive musical duet model based on the analysis of human duet interactions.
Unity in Diversity was selected for presentation in the “Improvising Algorithms” concert at the Musical Metacreation Weekend in Sydney, Australia in 2013. The concert, curated internationally, showcased this work alongside contributions from leading artists in the field of human-computer interactive music. Additionally, two academic papers discussing the evaluations of the CIM system from both performer and audience perspectives were published at Creativity & Cognition 2013 and the International Conference on Computational Creativity.
References:
- Brown, Andrew R., Toby Gifford, and Bradley Voltz. 2013. “Controlling Interactive Music Performance (CIM).” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity, edited by Mary Lou Maher, Tony Veale, Rob Saunders, and Oliver Bown, p.221. Sydney: The Association for Computational Creativity.
- Brown, Andrew R., and Toby Gifford. 2013. “Prediction and Proactivity in Real-Time Interactive Music Systems.” In Musical Metacreation: Papers from the 2013 AIIDE Workshop, 35–39. Boston, USA: AAAI.