Engineering Creative Interactions: Music + AI

Catalog description

This course is a collaboration between the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and School of Music (SOM) collaborative pianists and singers. ECE seniors in course 18-500 work on a Capstone project that satisfies the wishes of their "customer," resulting in an invention or prototype to support the customer. Student duos will bring in repertoire including piano-vocal duos, scenes and monologues and other assigned repertoire to be performed for their faculty and peers. The instructor will observe their performances from the standpoint of body language, technique, prosody, resonance, breath, intention and delivery. Co-teachers will offer performers techniques for better connection to self and others with the goal of synchronicity, embodied intention, flow, projection and accuracy. Collaboration between artists and scientists is fertile ground for the field of computer-human interaction as well as human-human interaction. Data gathered from observation of performer tendencies and improvement in the quality of the performance would benefit machine learning or give new insights to the interactions between human performers. The research professor or student candidate in the Sciences may be interested in cultivating a data set for a current and specific project or future research, whereas students in both music and non-music fields could participate as performers and/or respond to question prompts by co-teachers to collect a data set in real time. For example, during a performance, if the question is "are the performers connecting?" student observers could use clickers to respond yes/no at various moments during the piece. Ground truth may also be provided by the instructor.