Tuesday, May 01, 2007

You knew it was coming....Computers that understand music.

Christopher Raphael of Indiana University demonstrated computer software that has the ability to understand and playback music in realtime with other musicians. The software has the ability to transcribe and playback music in realtime, potentially making our new overloads not only efficient killers, but also great artisans as well. Who would have thought it.

quote:

Technology is changing our sense of what music can be," Raphael says. "The effect is profound." The new software was not easy to develop, however. Raphael compares it to the slow progress in effective speech recognition. "There's been a veritable army of people who've worked on speech recognition for several decades, and [the problem] still remains open," he says. "Any time you deal with real data, there is a huge amount of variation that you have to understand."


via ArsTechnica.com

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just when you thought that auto accompaniment was left twitching and dying in the eighties like the cheap cover band and mum next door enhancing godawful scourge on musical skill that it is....

[cue jaws theme music]

Anonymous said...

Why do we keep inventing new ways to make bland music? I want to know that. Seriously. Sure it's interesting in an academic sense, but the practical applications are near nothing, considering the inevitable complexity of trying to make such technology user accessible... in other words, even if it works right, it's going to be difficult for it to filter down out of the laboratories into the hands of home users due to its complexity, which history has told us is neccessary for a new technology to be utilized creatively. So I forsee a slew of potentially good technology packed into interfaces that are little better than preset FX boxes and push-button preprogrammed auto accompanying garbage.