Contrary motion: An oppositional interactive music system

Abstract

The hypothesis of this interaction research project is that it can be stimulating for experimental musicians to confront a system which ‘opposes’ their musical style. The ‘contrary motion’ of the title is the name of a MIDI-based realtime musical software agent which uses machine listening to establish the musical context, and thereby chooses its own responses to differentiate its position from that of its human interlocutant. To do this requires a deep consideration of the space of musical actions, so as to explicate what opposition should constitute, and machine listening technology (most prominently represented by new online beat and stream tracking algorithms) which gives an accurate measurement of player position so as to consistently avoid it. An initial pilot evaluation was undertaken, feeding back critical data to the developing design.