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THE SMUSE: AN EMBODIED COGNITION APPROACH TO
INTERACTIVE MUSIC COMPOSITION
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ABSTRACT
The evolution of computer-based music systems has gone
from computer-aided composition, which transposed the
traditional paradigms of music composition to the digital
realm, to complex feedback systems that allow for rich
multimodal interactions. Yet, a lot of interactive music
systems still rely on outdated principles in the light of
modern situated cognitive systems design. Moreover, the
role of human emotional feedback, arguably an important
feature of musical experience, is rarely taken into account
into the interaction loop. We propose to address these limitations by introducing a novel situated synthetic interactive composition system called the SMuSe (for Situated
Music Server). The SMuSe is based on the principles of
parallelism, situatedness, emergence and emotional feedback and is built on a cognitively plausible architecture.
It allows to address questions at the intersection of music
perception and cognition while being used as a creative
tool for interactive music composition.
1. BACKGROUND
Interactivity has now become a standard feature of many
multimedia systems and plays a fundamental role in contemporary art practice. Specifically, real-time human/machine
interactive music systems are now omnipresent as both
composition and live performance tools. Yet, the term
"interactive music system" is often misused. The interaction that takes place between a human and a system is a
process that includes both control and feedback, where the
real-world actions are interpreted into the virtual domain
of the system [4]. If some parts of the interaction loop are
missing (for instance the cognitive level in Figure 1), the
system becomes only a reactive (vs. interactive) system.
As a matter of fact, in most of current human-computer
musical systems, the human agent interacts whereas the
machine due to a lack of cognitive modeling only reacts.
Although the term interactivity is widely used in the new
media arts, most systems are simply reactive systems [4].
Furthermore, the cognitive modeling of interactive multimedia systems, when it exists, often relies on a classical
cognitive science approach to artificial systems where the
different modules (e.g. perception, memory, action) are
studied separately. This approach has since been challenged by modern cognitive science, which emphasizes
the crucial role of the perception-action loop, the building of cognitive artifacts, as well as the interaction of the
system with its environment [37]. In this paper we propose a novel approach to interactive music system design
informed by modern cognitive science and present an implementation of such a system called the SMuSe.
Human Interaction Machine
Figure 1. Human machine interaction (adapted from [4])
2. FROM EMBODIED COGNITIVE SCIENCE TO
MUSIC SYSTEMS DESIGN
2.1. Classical View
A look at the evolution of our understanding of cognitive
systems put in parallel with the evolution of music composition practices, gives a particularly interesting perspective on some limitations of actual interactive music systems.
The classical approach to cognitive science assumes that
external behavior is mediated by internal representations
[6] and that cognition is basically the manipulation of these
mental representations by sets of rules. It mainly relies on
the sense-think-act framework [27], where future actions
are planned according to perceptual information.
Interestingly enough, a parallel can be drawn between classical cognitive science and the development of classical
music which also heavily relies on the use of formal structures. It puts the emphasis on internal processes (composition theory) to the detriment of the environment or the
body, with a centralized control of the performance (the
conductor).
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