[agi] Music and AI's Friendliness

[cosmodelia]

Music and AI's Friendliness Hi Ben: The project you describe -- AGI applied to music -- is one very dear to my heart... It is great to know a person working in one of the few projects of AGI loves music, and I guess art. It is something I miss in the transhumanist community at large. It is a mystery for me what it is easier to share about transhumanism & AI with digital musicians than on music/art with transhumanists. [By the way: how to translate "heart" into code? It is "something" we miss and many of us try rigth now to include in our electronic compostions.] Like many tech geeks, I'm a spare-time musician. Mostly a composer -- I play the keyboards a lot, but my keyboard skills remain uneven (though excellent in some respects).... years ago I wrote some cool programs for automatic composition, and they worked pretty well, Are they available? I'm in touch with musicians exploring that kind of tools. Feedback can be interesting for you. but they bored me, because coming up with music myself thru composition & improvisation is what really interests me in music. I see a challenge in the possiblity of creative IAs [not only musical] in the next time cycle towards singularity. It is only a intuition but I think music could be a commun languaje between a friendly IA and human beings. Maybe thanks to my creative work with computers I see the need for 1) expanded time/space logics [and functions] that give fresh opportunities to establish a interactive relationship between both intelligences [artificial and human] 2) fresh tools [and/or instruments] that can help to explore together the sonic territories that opened up in the restructural musics of the last fifty years, and 3) broad knowledge of music as a nootropic, in connection with a creative evolutionary psychology. New options in this context are directly related to the emergence of increased information directives, as well as the challenge of developing fresh formal constructs that allow for dynamic creative interchange and interaction. In this context, the emergence of creative IAs is totally consistent with the route of a ethics and friendliness in the development [and interest] of them, and mutual enrichment in the inter-relationship human/IAs. With musical disciplines it would be possible to reinvestigate energy’s dynamics and new sounds combinations/languages as well as fresh exploratory form-states. I am also interested in a study the issue of expressiveness in the context of cyber/human interpretations and composition, exploring computer technology as part of the greater challenge of interaction dynamics – human and/or artificial intelligence: the complex brilliance of hybrids sound-worlds. Free jazz musicians as Anthony Braxton have many things to contribute in this issue. [In this post I’m adapting to IA issues some ideas of freejazzers I found extremely inspirating.] The creator of the word "meme" Richard Dawkins wrote about the success of the meme "God". Between other explanations of its success, he remarked that meme had and has a music and art to its service. That I missing in the >H community is not a personal affair. So my dream re music is 1) an AI system that I can jam with -- that will come up with new ideas on the fly, taking its cue from my ideas but leading me in new directions -- AND 2) an AI system that will take my musical ideas and work them out to a level of complexity and coherence that the human mind cannot carry out. You can be sure many of us would like it too. I am pleased to see others are working toward this actively. Miranda is not the only one. See this: Second International Conference of Music and Artificial Intelligence (ICMAI'02) Edinburgh, September 2002 http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Conferences/02-9-icm.html Music and Artificial Life' Links Page http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~rodney/Alife_Music.htm Novamente does not include a musical component at the moment. We have talked about incorporating one at some point in the future though. I'm not sure it's on the short path to true AGI, *but* a) it would be a lot of fun for me The pleasure [even when it is a pleasurable creative agony] that we can derive from making aesthetic decisions ourselves [and together with a co-creative IA] by largely intuitive means is a major factor in determining how actively >H should pursue development of intelligent compositional tools. My interest in the use of intelligent compositional tools is more to gain insight into my own hypotheses regarding the workings of our own intuitive processes by implementing them as IAs [one might think of this as an analysis-by-synthesis approach], gain insight into aspects of arbitrariness in our compositional decisions by abdicating certain of those decisions to a computer program which ultimately has some arbitrary [random] component at the base of its decision-making process, and explore the applicability of some specific abstract idea [musical and/or extra-musical)] to musical composition and creativiy at large. b) more importantly, I think that making the program musically interact with humans, would be a big help in helping the system *emotionally* understand humans ... which is important for the system's long-term Friendliness toward humans IMHO this is the core of your post and this topic. It is also true in the complementary way: human beings developing a long-term Friendliness toward IAs, exploring together a deep relationship between the artificial and the human intelligences, and the universe as ever-growing Creatrix. I would be curious to hear your further thoughts on AI & music Thank you for your interest. Here you have some of them, I hope you can understand my weird English and they have some value. I’m also very interested in your thoughts on AI & music, and in your future developments of software. Cosmodelia