I have a number of items from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Metacreation Lab January 2021 newsletter (received via email on Jan. 5, 2020).
29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence! or IJCAI-PRICAI2020 being held on Jan. 7 – 15, 2021
This first excerpt features a conference that’s currently taking place,,
Musical Metacreation Tutorial at IIJCAI – PRICAI 2020 [Yes, the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence or IJCAI-PRICAI2020 is being held in 2021!]
As part of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI – PRICAI 2020, January 7-15), Philippe Pasquier will lead a tutorial on Musical Metacreation. This tutorial aims at introducing the field of musical metacreation and its current developments, promises, and challenges.
The tutorial will be held this Friday, January 8th, from 9 am to 12:20 pm JST ([JST = Japanese Standard Time] 12 am to 3:20 am UTC [or 4 pm – 7:30 pm PST]) and a full description of the syllabus can be found here. For details about registration for the conference and tutorials, click below.
Register for IJCAI – PRICAI 2020
The conference will be held at a virtual venue created by Virtual Chair on the gather.town platform, which offers the spontaneity of mingling with colleagues from all over the world while in the comfort of your home. The platform will allow attendees to customize avatars to fit their mood, enjoy a virtual traditional Japanese village, take part in plenary talks and more.
Two calls for papers
These two excerpts from SFU’s Metacreation Lab January 2021 newsletter feature one upcoming conference and an upcoming workshop, both with calls for papers,
2nd Conference on AI Music Creativity (MuMe + CSMC)
The second Conference on AI Music Creativity brings together two overlapping research forums: The Computer Simulation of Music Creativity Conference (est. 2016) and The International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (est. 2012). The objective of the conference is to bring together scholars and artists interested in the emulation and extension of musical creativity through computational means and to provide them with an interdisciplinary platform in which to present and discuss their work in scientific and artistic contexts.
The 2021 Conference on AI Music Creativity will be hosted by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) of the University of Music and Performing Arts of Graz, Austria and held online. The five-day program will feature paper presentations, concerts, panel discussions, workshops, tutorials, sound installations and two keynotes.
AIART 2021
The 3rd IEEE Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Art Creation (AIART) workshop has been announced for 2021. to bring forward cutting-edge technologies and most recent advances in the area of AI art in terms of enabling creation, analysis and understanding technologies. The theme topic of the workshop will be AI creativity, and will be accompanied by a Special Issue of the renowned SCI journal.
AIART is inviting high-quality papers presenting or addressing issues related to AI art, in a wide range of topics. The submission due date is January 31, 2021, and you can learn about the wide range of topics accepted below:
Toying with music
SFU’s Metacreation Lab January 2021 newsletter also features a kind of musical toy,
MMM : Multi-Track Music Machine
One of the latest projects at the Metacreation Lab is MMM: a generative music generation system based on Transformer architecture, capable of generating multi-track music, developed by Jeff Enns and Philippe Pasquier.
Based on an auto-regressive model, the system is capable of generating music from scratch using a wide range of preset instruments. Inputs from one or several tracks can condition the generation of new tracks, resampling MIDI input from the user or adding further layers of music.
To learn more about the system and see it in action, click below and watch the demonstration video, hear some examples, or try the program yourself through Google Colab.
Why Sentience?
Finally, for anyone who was wondering what happened at the 2020 International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA 2020) held virtually in Montreal in the fall, here’s some news from SFU’s Metacreation Lab January 2021 newsletter,
ISEA2020 Recap // Why Sentience?
As we look back at one of the most unprecedented years, some of the questions explored at ISEA2020 are more salient now than ever. This recap video highlights some of the most memorable moments from last year’s virtual symposium.
ISEA2020 // Why Sentience? Recap Video
The Metacreation Lab’s researchers explored some of these guiding questions at ISEA2020 with two papers presented at the symposium: Chatterbox: an interactive system of gibberish agents and Liminal Scape, An Interactive Visual Installation with Expressive AI. These papers, and the full proceedings from ISEA2020 can now be accessed below.
The video is a slick, flashy, and fun 15 minutes or so. In addition to the recap for ISEA 2020, there’s a plug for ISEA 2022 in Barcelona, Spain.
The proceedings took my system a while to download (there are approximately 700 pp.). By the way, here’s another link to the proceedings or rather to the archives for the 2020 and previous years’ ISEA proceedings.