{"id":329,"date":"2013-04-29T21:33:19","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T21:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/?p=329"},"modified":"2013-04-29T21:37:57","modified_gmt":"2013-04-29T21:37:57","slug":"isomer-musical-metacreation-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/2013\/04\/29\/isomer-musical-metacreation-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Isomer Musical Metacreation Project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With support from Dickinson\u2019s Mellon Digital Humanities initiative Dickinson student Jamie Leidwinger (&#8217;15) will be working this summer under the direction of composer, technologist, pianist, and entrepreneur <a href=\"http:\/\/gregwilder.com\/\">Greg Wilder<\/a> on his <a href=\"http:\/\/composingthefuture.com\/\">Isomer Project<\/a>, an ongoing research project in computational creativity.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/composingthefuture.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright  wp-image-330\" alt=\"logo for the Isomer project\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/isomer-square-logo-300x300.jpg\" width=\"180\" height=\"180\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/isomer-square-logo-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/isomer-square-logo-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/isomer-square-logo.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px\" \/><\/a>The Isomer Project\u00a0is a suite of software tools that is the culmination of a decade of independent research and commercial development. Its aim is to combine musical models of human creativity with modern machine learning techniques to more fully understand and explore computational creativity.<\/p>\n<p>Greg has taught a number of courses at Dickinson over the years, including advanced composition, music theory, aural skills, choral arranging, and computer music. As a founder and the chief science officer of Clio Music, he designed, developed, and implemented a proprietary autonomous music analysis and motivic data mining technology (\u201cClio\u201d) capable of generating comprehensive models from music in any style or genre and comparing them for similarity.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_331\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/gregwilder.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-331\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-331 \" alt=\"head shot of Greg Wilder\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/greg-headshot-300x252.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"252\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/greg-headshot-300x252.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/greg-headshot.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-331\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Greg Wilder<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The summer research collaboration will take place in Philadelphia, at Drexel University&#8217;s Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (<a href=\"http:\/\/drexel.edu\/excite\/\">ExCITe<\/a>) Center, which is a hub for teams of faculty, students, and entrepreneurs to pursue highly multi-disciplinary, collaborative projects. ExCITe project participants come from engineering, fashion design, digital media, performing arts, computer and information science, product design, and many other fields.<\/p>\n<p>Co-working at the ExCITe center with its director <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ece.drexel.edu\/faculty\/kim\/\">Dr. Youngmoo Kim<\/a> and his team of PhD researchers at the <a href=\"http:\/\/music.ece.drexel.edu\/\">Media Entertainment and Technology laboratory<\/a>, Leidwinger will be helping Wilder to develop the full potential of the Isomer software.<\/p>\n<p>The immediate goal of the summer project will be to validate the boundaries of the Isomer software\u2019s capacity for musical analysis, model representation, and algorithmic transformation using advanced machine-learning techniques. Leidwinger will be assisting with the curation and preparation of musical models, analyzing musical data for research validation, creating musical metadata, and keeping us up to date with blog posts via the Isomer web site and other social media outlets.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/harmonic-tension-patterns-in-varese.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-332 alignright\" alt=\"graphic of music made by Isomer Project\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/harmonic-tension-patterns-in-varese-300x225.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/harmonic-tension-patterns-in-varese-300x225.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/harmonic-tension-patterns-in-varese-624x468.png 624w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/harmonic-tension-patterns-in-varese.png 960w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Metacreation (or computational creativity) is the idea of endowing machines with creative behavior. Metacreation, as a technology-driven approach to generative art, involves using tools and techniques from artificial intelligence, artificial life, and machine learning (themselves inspired by cognitive and life sciences) to develop software that is creative on its own.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/pitch-expectation-patterns-in-chopin.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-335 alignnone\" alt=\"graph showing processed version of a Chopin etude\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/pitch-expectation-patterns-in-chopin-300x225.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/pitch-expectation-patterns-in-chopin-300x225.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/pitch-expectation-patterns-in-chopin-624x468.png 624w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/files\/2013\/04\/pitch-expectation-patterns-in-chopin.png 960w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An essential step in the development of a metacreation tool like Isomer is to validate its analyzed data and musical output (i.e., does Isomer capture the essential aspects of the musical models in terms of musical grammar, affect and mood?). In the past, Dr. Wilder\u2019s technology has powered products for some of the largest companies in the music industry (e.g., Rovi Corp) and is now finding application in the creation of new art and academic research projects. Building on seminal research in musical perception and cognition (e.g.\u00a0 Leonard B. Meyer, Fred Lerdahl, Eugene Narmour, Emilios Cambouropoulos), Isomer relies on a comprehensive ontology of musical parameters. It accepts model input as raw audio, symbolic representation, or both, and extracts a range of analysis vectors that capture trends in terms of texture (timbre), pitch, rhythm, and form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With support from Dickinson\u2019s Mellon Digital Humanities initiative Dickinson student Jamie Leidwinger (&#8217;15) will be working this summer under the direction of composer, technologist, pianist, and entrepreneur Greg Wilder on his Isomer Project, an ongoing research project in computational creativity. The Isomer Project\u00a0is a suite of software tools that is the culmination of a decade [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1994],"tags":[77804,77803],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects","tag-greg-wilder","tag-isomer-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}