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Abstract: Advances in generative modeling have opened up exciting new possibilities for music making. How can we leverage these models to support human creative processes? First, I’ll illustrate how we can design generative models to better support music composition and performance synthesis: Coconet, the ML model behind the Bach Doodle, supports a nonlinear compositional process through an iterative block-Gibbs like generative procedure, while MIDI-DDSP supports intuitive user control in performance synthesis through hierarchical modeling. Second, I’ll propose a common framework, Expressive Communication, for evaluating how developments in generative models and steering interfaces are both important for empowering human-ai co-creation, where the goal is to create music that communicates an imagery or mood. Third, I’ll introduce the AI Song Contest and discuss some of the technical, creative, and sociocultural challenges musicians face when adapting ML-powered tools into their creative workflows. Looking ahead, I’m excited to co-design with musicians to discover new modes of human-ai collaboration. I’m interested in designing visualizations and interactions that can help musicians understand and steer system behavior, and algorithms that can learn from their feedback in more organic ways. I aim to build systems that musicians can shape, negotiate with, and jam with in their creative practice.

Bio: Anna Huang is a research lead on the Magenta project at Google DeepMind. She also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila—Québec AI Institute. Her research is at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction, with the goal of supporting music making, and more generally the human creative process. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet. Coconet was the ML model that powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle, in two days enabling tens of millions of users around the world to co-compose with ML in their web browser. She was an organizer for the international AI Song Contest, and a guest editor for TISMIR’s special issue on AI and Musical Creativity. This Fall, she will be joining Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as faculty, with a shared position between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Music and Theater Arts (MTA).

SEMINAR CANCELLED!!

We will reschedule this speaker for a later date.
Please forgive the late notice.