Introduction

We are delighted to announce the 1st International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (MUME 2012) to be held October 9, 2012, in conjunction with the Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE’12).

Computer technology has become a valuable tool in the modern composition, production and performance of music. Thanks to continued progress in artistic and scientific research, a new possibility is emerging in our musical relationship with technology: Generative Music or Musical Metacreation, the design and use of computer music systems which are “creative on their own”. Metacreation involves using tools and techniques from artificial intelligence, artificial life, and machine learning, themselves often inspired by cognitive and life sciences. Musical Metacreation suggest exciting new opportunities to enter creative music making: discovery and exploration of novel musical styles and content, collaboration between human performers and creative software “partners”, and design of systems in gaming and entertainment that dynamically generate or modify music.

The workshop will bring together artists, practitioners and researchers interested in developing software and systems that autonomously (or interactively) recognize, learn, represent, complete, accompany, compose or interpret music. In particular, emphasis will be put on systems with real-time aspects, since these are relevant to both art and entertainment communities.

For those who are interested in clarifying if their work is within the domain of the conference or workshop, we recommend looking at the AIIDE conference proceedings for further detail.

Our Motivation for Initiating MUME 2012

We have observed a strong and sustained growth of the field of generative music and more generally Musical Metacreation. Until this point, the work has been presented across a range of venues in related fields, including the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), Sound and Music Computing (SMC), EvoMusArt, Generative Art, the symposium of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) and other AI- and entertainment computing or computer-music conferences. We feel it is time to gather experts and specialists in a more focused arena, to define, explore and push forward the boundaries of Musical Metacreation. We hope the MUME2012 workshop will become the first in an ongoing series.