Charles Martin

In June I travelled to NIME2018 at Virginia Tech to present some of work from the RITMO centre and EPEC project at the University of Oslo. This year, our NIME presentations were focussed on “standstill performance”—where participants have to stand as still as possible to create sound. In previous years, our group had created standstill performances using motion capture in the lab, but our new work was on ways to do this at live events, and even in installations, using the Bela single-board computer.

I recently had the chance to present a paper about my “Neural iPad Ensemble” at the Audio Mostly conference in London. The paper, discusses how machine learning can help to model and create free-improvised music on new interfaces, where the rules of music theory may not fit. I described the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) design that I used to produce an AI iPad ensemble that responds to a “lead” human performer. In the demonstration session, I set up the iPads and RNN and had lots of fun jamming with the conference attendees.

We presented MicroJam this week at the Boost Technology and Equality in Music Conference at Sentralen, Oslo. The conference arranged a Tech Showcase session in Hvelvet, Sentralen’s old bank vault with developers of music apps, synthesisers, robots and education software.

We recently hosted a music technology event at the Department of Informatics to gather together researchers and students from the University of Oslo to see performances and demonstrations of current research.