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Creative Technology – An Oxymoron?

Creative Technology – An Oxymoron?. Reinhold Behringer John Elliott Ben Dalton Michael Ward. Innovation North Faculty of Information and Technology. This Symposium. R.Behringer: Creative Technology – An Oxymoron? J.Elliott: The Ineffable Self – An Architecture for an AI Mind

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Creative Technology – An Oxymoron?

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  1. Creative Technology – An Oxymoron? Reinhold Behringer John Elliott Ben Dalton Michael Ward Innovation North Faculty of Information and Technology

  2. This Symposium • R.Behringer: • Creative Technology – An Oxymoron? • J.Elliott: • The Ineffable Self – An Architecture for an AI Mind • Michael Ward: • Machine Listening and Beat Tracking • Ben Dalton: • Robotics Mediated Tele-Presence – Creativity at a Distance

  3. Creative Technology • The term “Creative Technology”: • Usually: technology which is used to empower human creativity. • Music instruments, tools for graphics design, etc. • Literally: can technology be creative? • Answer requires: • Definition of human creativity.

  4. Human Creativity • “Creativity is the ability to think up and design new inventions, produce works of art, solve problems in new ways, or develop an idea based on an original, novel, or unconventional approach.” Childrens’s Health Encyclopedia • “Ability to produce something new through imaginative skill, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia • Is related to, but not identical to “intelligence”. • Appears to be a result of environment in childhood. • Relationship exists between creativity and mental illness. • Testing Creativity with Torrance (1974) test: • Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus. • Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses. • Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects. • Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses. Torrance, E.P. (1974). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Personnel Press.

  5. Artificial Creativity • Also known as “Computational Creativity”, since computers are central. • Is multidisciplinary: • Artificial Intelligence, • Cognitive Psychology, • Arts. • Imminent conflict: “how can a programmed deterministic machine be creative?”

  6. Applications • Computer music: • Automatic composition. • “The computer as musician”. • Visual and graphic arts: • Automatic creation of paintings, drawings. • Linguistic: • Automatic generation of poetry.

  7. Inherent Problems • Artificial creativity requires understanding of principles of aesthetics. • Judging what is “good” and what is “bad”. • Human input will guide this. • General question: • Why artificially created artwork? • What is the “message” of such an art?

  8. Creation Principles • Randomness and Stochastics: • Many modern artists see randomness as a form of art, and are computers not better at being random than humans?Alex Yakubovich • Rule-based: • Aesthetics is implicitly coded in algorithms.

  9. Music: Algorithmic Composition • In ancient Greek: • Music related to numbers (Plato and Ptolemy). • Theoretical formalisms, applied to numbers, led to music. • Randomness as musical element: • W.A.Mozart: “Musikalisches Würfelspiel” • John Cage: “Reunion” (1968), based on chess play. • With computer: • First proposed by Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) • Different approaches: • Stochastic: random elements • Rule-based • Artificial intelligence: e.g. genetic programming • Composers: • Iannis Xenakis: automatically created musical material. • Lejaren Hiller: Markov chains, statistical analysis. Program: MUSICOMP

  10. David Cope: “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” • Computer-generated compositions in style of classical composers: • Uses existing music in database. • deconstruction (analyze and separate into parts) • signatures (commonality - retain that which signifies style) • compatibility (recombinancy - recombine into new works) http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm

  11. “VARIATIONS: Algorithmic Composition for Acoustic Instruments” • By Bruce Jacob (since 1994) • http://www.ece.umd.edu/~blj/algorithmic_composition/ • “I want to write more music than what I have time to write” • Concept: • Composer: genetic algorithms • Ear: Automatic “grading” of composed output. • Arranger: concatenate snippets into larger pieces.

  12. Performance: The “Absolute Machine” • By Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska • http://bea.st/sight/absolutQuartet/ • http://www.absolut.com/absolutmachines/ • http://youtube.com/watch?v=1e9AJVtuCKc • User plays a short theme • Machine creates longer music, with performance by “unusual” instruments: • Ball is shot into air, bounces onto keys • Custom-tuned wine glasses • 9 ethnic instruments video

  13. Visual and Graphics • Colours, shapes as output of algorithm. • Moving graphics bring time as additional element.

  14. Harold Cohen: AARON • Aaron: autonomous generator of graphics. • Uses: • Knowledge about external world objects (declarative, external) • Knowledge about representation building (procedural, internal) • Starts in foreground and moves towards background. • http://www.usask.ca/art/digital_culture/wiebe/paint.html

  15. Video (1987)

  16. Linguistic • Automatic creation of texts: • For songs. • For fun. • Scientific paper generator: • http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

  17. SciGen • Automatic CS paper generator. • http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ • Uses context-free grammar.

  18. Raymond Kurzweil: Cybernetic Poet • http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/poetry/rkcp_overview.php3 • Software: • Reads human-created poems • Creates a language model • Writes “original” poems based on that model • I think I'll crash.Just for myself with Godpeace on a curious soundfor myself in my heart?And life is weepingFrom a bleeding heartof boughs bendingsuch paths of them,of boughs bendingsuch paths of breezeknows we've been there

  19. Turing Test • Alan Turing (1950): • Machine passes the “turing test” if a human observers cannot distinguish (during interaction with the machine) if the machine responses are automatic or created by a human. • Used for AI. Could be used for CT.

  20. Creative Tech – Oxymoron? • Maybe: • Artificial creativity seems to be based a lot on human input. • Maybe not: • Uncovering of general aesthetic principles may lead to true creativity. • http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/presentations • r.behringer@leedsmet.ac.uk

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