LOOKING BEYOND CREATIVE SUPPORT: AUGMENTING THE PERCEIVED AGENCY OF MUSIC CO-CREATION SYSTEMS

Abstract

Musical systems that are designed for creative collaboration are often perceived as creative support tools. However, can they engender a sense of co creating with a collaborator? Related work that has addressed this question has developed interactive music systems for creative support, computational improvisation systems for engendering creative musical partnerships, and studied factors that are important to the human's sense of art-based co creation. In this research, a music co-creation system is developed to directly impact the musician's experiences of co-creation and is evaluated in controlled performance conditions by musicians. The main findings from this work are that 1) systematic variations in the system design parameters engendered different experiences of co-creation, 2) musicians distinguished experiences of co-creation from creative support through their perception of the systems' agency. The contributions to system design from this work are the design principles for music co-creation system, a representation for negotiating musical decisions, and an algorithmic technique for generating rhythmic variations in rhythmic duets. Through the experiments, this work extends prior work on evaluating co-creative system without human comparisons, and identifies metrics for operationalising the perceived agency of music co-creation systems. Future work will involve extending the system to develop semi-autonomous music partners.