computational creativity (2013-present)
My interest in computational creativity was initially driven by a general interest in generative music, more specifically as it applies to dynamic scoring of video games. Given the rules-based approach of a majority of generative music systems, I became interested in exploring what other options were available. This led somewhat naturally to the study of computational creativity as it applies to music composition which now forms the backbone of my doctoral research.
Intuitively, it might not be easy to understand that the creative process of an artist is also an explorative one. But, bringing something into existence requires being able to imagine experiencing it first. In this instance, the imagination serves as an unmapped territory for the artist to explore. The objects residing in this territory are often familiar. Yet, the artists exploration of their relationships and/or transformations will often lead to the discovery of a configuration that is unfamiliar. This discovery is initially quite exciting and may bring the artist a great deal of pleasure. But as the exploration continues, and the artist is able to understand the new discovery better, familiarity will lead to restlessness which will ultimately push the artist to move on to new territory. This pattern of exploration and discovery leading to comprehension in turn leading to further exploration aligns closely with Jurgen Schmidhuber's Theory of Creativity which serves as the impetus for my main research interest. A Hierarchical System for Autonomous Musical Creation
(as published in the Proceedings of the 2014 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive
Digital Entertainment)
The research into computational creativity was used as a platform for the sonification of some musical taste data. A write-up and links to some of the sonification results are below:
