Something abit more sophisticated than the long delays’ etc, at the first post

thanks

flip, i wasn’t really talking about the state, but the scientific study. there was one done on on monks in the meditative state. they were monitoring the brain waves of the monks (alpha beta delta). i’ll get the waves all wrong, but basically it was found that in the state the monks transcended noral consciousness to a state closer to lucid dream likeness but beyond. i think with improvisation its a similar experience but grounded in the shared experience not the personal introspection.

kobe i know you jest but there is something to the druggie musician angle too.

When it comes to getting in the zone I do it best when I don’t have to think about the technology onstage. As much as I’d love to be able to really manipulate my songs onstage it takes away from my singing and just distracts me. I do am much programming as possible before hand so that I have to hit the least amount of button onstage. My geek brain and performer brain are very different. Fluqe’s Onstage has been great for that. Well that is until the time I was hit a patch change that I didn’t mean to. That took me right out of the groove!!

I’m more interested in creating performance with the aid of computer, than to the music itself. Thus I share the “out of body ” approach, more than the procedural IRCAM way.

When we speak about AI we should keep in mind that in AI we can have two approach as bottom-up (with neural nets) or the reverse way (with formalized rules or high abstraction level).

Both approaches are valid, but in this case it looks like that a neural approach is nearer to what we are searching.
It’s not overtly difficult to write down a back propagation net, who learn maybe from your playing.

It would be interesting to create this kind of code and play along. At least in theory the net could replicate more or less your way of playing .. a kind of ghost in the machine …

Good point the suggestion to “close your eyes” (which effectively change the electromagnetic activity of the brain); of course we need to be really confident in our equipment … and in our stage training.

But we should not forget that intelligence is not only in he brain, but in the full body.

(well, at least this my official excuse to use the Gypsy controller…).

motor

@kobe: “-or was that already implied, as these were jazz musicians?”

Yeah, but then the scientists doing the monitoring would probably screw up the data or forget where they put it due to second hand smoke. On that note, I can can compose tons of music very quickly using computers, but if you gave me a drag of some good sh*t, I’d be useless. My set-up is too complex for any half-baked errors! I’ve actually seen increased productivity when composing while hungry…it makes you much more quick/alert.

I’m going to disagree with the “similar state” or writers, visual artists, etc. Though being “in the moment” of course is similar, totally different parts of the brain are being utilized during improvisation. It’s especially different with PCs versus my first love, saxophone. Electronic hardware use typically involves consciousness of technical details, whereas playing an improv solo does not. You’d better already know what the bits under your hands are supposed to do before you start playing!

It really is an amazing experience, ever as one performs it, of generating scads of syncopated notes cascading along in lengths and pauses, polyrhythms, playing off of and leaving the base tonal area of the accompaniment. Your mind cannot consciously parse all that’s going on, but your “subconscious” for lack of more precise term is capable of understanding and responding at a speed that leaves your “conscious” mind aghast.

Doing variations on existing forms (typed in or read from MIDI files) is possible; changing keys is possible, stuff like that.

But: while 40 years ago some felt that computer intelligence was on the horizon, we’ve learned since then how much we have to know, that we take for granted, and how little we understand ourselves.

Computers can be programmed – by humans – to mimic well-understood human behavior. But I predict that computer learning, except for the relatively trivial, is far, far away. And it’s hardly worth pursuing, when so many of us want to make music.