Maxine’s Turing Test – A Player-Program as Co-Ethnographer of Socio-Aesthetic Interaction in Improvised Music

Abstract

Beyond the goal of refining system design to the needs and tastes of users, user evaluation of interactive music systems offers a method of examining the nature of musical creativity as understood by its human practitioners. In the case of improvising music systems, user study and evaluation of a system’s ability to improvise may be useful in the ethnomusicological study of musical interaction in contemporary improvised music. A survey of preliminary findings based on the interactions of an improvising system, Maxine, with several improvisers is discussed, with results suggesting methodological reconfigurations of the purpose and goals of evaluating of interactive musical metacreations.

Artificial Intelligence, Humanness, and Nonverbal Sociality

“…Much of my fieldwork has been dedicated to staging encounters with improvisers and the virtual improvisers I have designed over the past several years. Most of this work has focused on testing one system in particular, known as 'Maxine' 6 , which I first designed in 2009 (Banerji 2012(Banerji , 2016 7 . These encounters have largely consisted of private meetings I have arranged for improvisers to meet with me at my studio for the purpose of playing with Maxine.…”

The Musical Metacreation Weekend: Challenges Arising from the Live Presentation of Musically Metacreative Systems

“…Numerous discussion of the evaluation by audiences and performers of MuMe system can be found in the literature (e.g., Pearce and Wiggins, 2001;Collins, 2006;Hsu and Sosnick, 2009;Ariza, 2009;Eigenfeldt, Burnett, and Pasquier, 2012;Blackwell, Bown, and Young, 2012;Banerji, 2012). During the MuMe Weekend, no formal evaluation was undertaken, but the weekend provided an informal forum for attendees to discuss their impressions of different systems.…”

“…The question of how a performer should perform with a system is therefore raised (see Banerji (2012) for an original take on this from an ethnographic perspective), but only as a peculiar subset of what performers routinely think about: how to perform, how to interact with other humans. The same two distinct goals may interfere here as in the creation of systems: to make the best music in the context of a concert, and to best bring out the workings of the system.…”