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Special track on AI and Orchestration

Further informations for candidate artists
In recent years, a research synergy has emerged around the question of theorizing and using musical orchestration. Musical orchestration is understood here in its broad sense of the ability to combine the specificities of several musical sources to achieve a particular auditory objective. This complex skill has a huge impact on classical and popular music, film and television, and video game development. In this context, two recently funded projects (ANR-NSERC MAKIMOno and SSHRC ACTOR) aim to create a true scientific theory of orchestration, by incorporating expertise in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, signal processing and theoretical musical analysis. These different projects lead to the development of models of deep learning and knowledge extraction able to link musical signals, symbolic scores, and perceptual analyses. Thus, several new generative systems aimed at enhancing musical creativity through artificial intelligence are currently emerging.
The aim of this call for residencies is to develop the use of these new technologies with the goal of creating innovative musical pieces. Thus, the residency would both improve the use and quality of these technologies, but also explore their creative potential, and allow their presentation to the general public through concerts and potentially interactive musical works and demonstrations. At the end of the residency, a musical piece is expected to be produced and existing collaborations with several orchestras might lead to its premiere in a leading international music venue.
 
The deadline for application is November 21th 2018 (midnight Paris time).

Useful links

Main call page
https://www.ulysses-network.eu/web/competitions/researchresidency_2019-2020/
Full orchestration research network:
https://actor-project.org/
Funded research projects
http://acids.ircam.fr/?ht_course=anr-makimono
http://sites.music.mcgill.ca/orchestration/

Hosting period

At the end of the final selection by an international jury, the laureates of the 2019/2020 Residency Program will be announced at the forum workshops in Paris on March 27th, 2019. The laureate will be granted a residence at Ircam, within the Repmus team, in collaboration with McGill university for a period of six months spanning from September 2019 to December 2020.

Brief description of the technologies and resources availble to the artist

  The funded projects are currently generating several novel types of approaches for musical orchestration. The candidate will have full access to unreleased generative systems but also previous orchestration technologies developed across the partnership. Hence, the previous target-based approach (Orchids, Orchidea) is still undergoing development and can be used. However, the project will put forward the most recent methods for computer-aided orchestration. Hence, systems for projective orchestration (mapping a piano score to an orchestra), audio synthesis (organized instrumental timbre spaces), audio waveform generation (used for opera and orchestral music generation), symbolic music transfer (composer and genre) and other state-of-art methods will be available and can be further developed in accordance with the artistic project.
 

Profile of the candidate

The artist should ideally be infused with modern technology and computing along with its strong musical skills and unique composition skills. A background in interactions with command-line models are required. Knowledge of Python programming is a plus but not a requirement.