Improvised Duet Interaction: Learning Improvisation Techniques for Automatic Accompaniment

Guangyu Xia, and Roger Dannenberg

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

The interaction between music improvisers is studied in the context of piano duets, where one improviser embellishes a melody, and the other plays a chordal accompaniment with great freedom. We created an automated accompaniment player that learns to play from example performances. Accompaniments are constructed by selecting and concatenating one-measure score units from actual performances. An important innovation is the ability to learn how the improvised accompaniment should respond to variations in the melody performance, using tempo and embellishment complexity as features, resulting in a truly interactive performance within a conventional musical framework. We conducted both objective and subjective evaluations, showing that the learned improviser performs more interactive, musical, and human-like accompaniment compared with the less responsive, rule-based baseline algorithm.

Citation:

Guangyu Xia, and Roger Dannenberg. 2017. Improvised Duet Interaction: Learning Improvisation Techniques for Automatic Accompaniment. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1176189

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{gxia2017,
 abstract = {The interaction between music improvisers is studied in the context of piano duets, where one improviser embellishes a melody, and the other plays a chordal accompaniment with great freedom. We created an automated accompaniment player that learns to play from example performances.  Accompaniments are constructed by selecting and concatenating one-measure score units from actual performances. An important innovation is the ability to learn how the improvised accompaniment should respond to variations in the melody performance, using tempo and embellishment complexity as features, resulting in a truly interactive performance within a conventional musical framework. We conducted both objective and subjective evaluations, showing that the learned improviser performs more interactive, musical, and human-like accompaniment compared with the less responsive, rule-based baseline algorithm.},
 address = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
 author = {Guangyu Xia and Roger Dannenberg},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1176189},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 pages = {110--114},
 publisher = {Aalborg University Copenhagen},
 title = {Improvised Duet Interaction: Learning Improvisation Techniques for Automatic Accompaniment},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2017/nime2017_paper0022.pdf},
 year = {2017}
}