Machine Musician

jagadee · Post by **jagadee** » 14 Sep 2008, 12:34

I am a graduate student at the Center for Music Technology at GeorgiaTech. Here is the link to a performance of our system "Dangum" that was developed at our lab - a computer system that can listen and improvise with a human mridangam player. The performance happened in April at the Eyedrum Gallery, Atlanta.

http://vimeo.com/1727884

mohan · Post by **mohan** » 14 Sep 2008, 12:57

Interesting stuff .. can you explain how it works? How does the machine know when it is its turn, for example?

cmlover · Post by **cmlover** » 14 Sep 2008, 19:42

A mazing!
I like your playing too Jagadeeswaran. Good luck with your experiments and do share them with us!

VK RAMAN · Post by **VK RAMAN** » 14 Sep 2008, 19:49

Atlanta is a very fertile ground along with other major cities to enrich carnatic music and instruments in U.S. Jagadeeswaran, good luck with your experiments. Thanks for keeping us informed.

hianusree · Post by **hianusree** » 14 Sep 2008, 20:00

Hi jagadeesh,

Your dangum is relly superbto listen too. seems like listening to a duel mrdangam

Regards,
hianusree

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 15 Sep 2008, 00:51

Jagadeeswaran, fantastic. Great combination of technology and art. It looks like later on the machine made you follow it rather than the other way!! Are you allowed to have this much fun in a graduate program?

Good luck and best wishes...

PUNARVASU · Post by **PUNARVASU** » 15 Sep 2008, 01:08

Jagadee,
it was fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

tkb · Post by **tkb** » 15 Sep 2008, 17:46

It was very good. Congrats to your team.

rajeeram · Post by **rajeeram** » 15 Sep 2008, 22:30

Way too cool!! Please do give us some technical insight into how this was done.

Imagine something like this for practicing kalpanaswarams back and forth. Set a raga, feed some patterns and you will have a perfect 'jamming' partner! Probably will be much harder to create such a program, given the amorphous nature of raga bhavam.

arunk · Post by **arunk** » 15 Sep 2008, 22:58

very cool and impressive!

Arun

PUNARVASU · Post by **PUNARVASU** » 15 Sep 2008, 23:16

Rajeeram,
how I wish it were possible; coming to think of it, I suppose it will be possible and will be very useful as you said.
Waiting for the day some one does it.

rshankar · Post by **rshankar** » 15 Sep 2008, 23:45

Awesome!

How does the thing work for those periods when both you and the machine are playing together?

Can the sound be changed to that of a ghaTam or mohrsing?

And finally, 'yay' for the versatile mac!

thanjavooran · Post by **thanjavooran** » 16 Sep 2008, 04:25

Quite interesting. Excellent presentation. it is a collective effort. congrats to your team.
thanjavooran

blackadder · Post by **blackadder** » 16 Sep 2008, 11:19

Great effort!!

jagadee · Post by **jagadee** » 16 Sep 2008, 21:41

Thanks everyone for the response. Here are my answers to the various questions.

Mohan : The call and response (when who to play) is controlled by a text file, which is like a score file that is fed into the system.
Vasanthakokilam : Yeah! We are allowed to have that much fun in our grad program

punarvasu : We are still improving the system and yes... we could easily change the sound to that of ghatam or morsing
Rajeeram,rshankar : We are also doing a lot of work on ragas. But, we are no where near to a kalpanaswaram improviser. You can read about my work at this blogpost : http://overthecouch.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... ation.html

For anyone interested in a detailed description of the system, it is here : http://overthecouch.blogspot.com/

mohan · Post by **mohan** » 17 Sep 2008, 06:41

jagadee wrote:The call and response (when who to play) is controlled by a text file, which is like a score file that is fed into the system.

I presume the score will have details of how many avartanams/or fractions of avartnams are played. This takes a little away from the improvised approach.

jagadee · Post by **jagadee** » 20 Sep 2008, 05:03

Mohan : This definitely takes away a little bit of the improvised approach.
But, we are improving the system to also find the ending of the turn - by like indentifying the thirmanams or once the korvai is played thrice...

Meanwhile, real time raag recognition is another area where our group has done a lot of research. You can see that here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze8ZoNuu94o

Thanks again for all the comments !