The Music Technology Group at Georgia Tech presents the latest concert in its Listening Machines series:
Machine Improvisation - "MegaBeat"
How would music sound when machines listen, improvise, and collaborate with humans?	Press Coverage: English: AJC/Grammy, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post Hebrew: Haaretz Ynet, NRG, Maariv TV Channel2 (mov), TV Channel9 (mov)
The Georgia Tech Music Technology Group is exploring different answers to this question as part of its "Listening Machines" concert and workshop series. The latest concert - Machine Improvisation "MegaBeat" - premiered at the Hamabada Art Center in Jerusalem, Israel, on March 25 2006. The concert featured interactive compositions where the audience used light sticks to shape the orchestra's music as it plays, a robot listened and responded to a human drum circle, and novices improvised jazz music by manipulating smart handheld toys. The concert featured three compositions exploring the ways in which machines can listen, improvise, and collaborate with humans to create new kinds of musical experiences: Jason Freeman's Glimmer engages the concert audience as musical collaborators who do not just listen to the performance but actively shape it. Each audience member is given a battery-operated light stick which he or she turns on and off over the course of the piece. Computer software analyzes live video of the audience and sends instructions to each musician via multi-colored lights mounted on each player's stand. Glimmer was originally commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2005. Gil Weinberg's iltur enables novice players to collaborate with improvising jazz musicians. Players use new musical controllers called Beatbugs to record live input from acoustic and electronic instruments and respond by transforming the recorded materials, creating theme-and-variation call-and-response routines on the fly. iltur and the Beatbugs were featured in concerts and festivals in Europe, the US and Canada. (With Scott Driscoll and Travis Thatcher). The concert concluded with Weinberg's world premiere of Jam'aa, an interactive jam session that integrates a robotic percussionist into a Middle Eastern drum circle. The robot, named Haile, listens to live percussionists, analyzes musical aspects of their playing such as rhythm, pitch, and timbre, and improvises along in an acoustically rich, expressive and surprising manner. It is designed to combine the benefits of computational power with the richness, visual interactivity, and expression of acoustic playing, inspiring players to interact with it in novel expressive manners. (With Scott Driscoll and Travis Thatcher). In the week preceding the concert in Jerusalem, the Georgia Tech Music Technology Group conducted a series of workshops and exhibtions where the public was invited to learn about and experiment with the new instruments and technology.