Dissertation Defense WHAT: Tristan Jehan: "Creating Music by Listening" WHEN: Friday, June 17, 2005, 2:00 PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) WEBCAST: http://www.media.mit.edu/events/movies/video.php?id=tristan-2005-06-17 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE: Tod Machover Professor of Music and Media MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences Peter Cariani Research Assistant Professor of Physiology Tufts Medical School François Pachet Researcher Sony Computer Science Laboratory Julius O. Smith III Associate Professor of Music and Electric Engineering CCRMA, Stanford University Barry Vercoe Professor of Media Arts and Sciences MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences ABSTRACT: Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models the life cycle of listening, composing, and performing, turning the machine into an active musician, instead of simply an instrument. We accomplish this through an analysis-synthesis technique by combined perceptual and structural modeling of the musical surface, which leads to a minimal data representation. We introduce a music cognition framework that results from the interaction of psychoacoustically grounded causal listening, a time-lag embedded feature representation, and perceptual similarity clustering. Our bottom-up analysis intends to be generic and uniform by recursively revealing metrical hierarchies and structures of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Training is suggested for top-down unbiased supervision, and is demonstrated with the prediction of downbeat. This musical intelligence enables a range of original manipulations including song alignment, music restoration, cross-synthesis, song morphing, and ultimately the synthesis of original pieces. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index