Embodied Perspectives on Musical AI (EmAI)

The workshop is free and open for anyone interested in the topic.

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About

Embodiment, or, more concretely, musical embodiment, denotes how the body shapes our musical experiences. For example, you may exert more or less effort depending on the uncertainty of some musical situations or while playing technically challenging tasks. Such varying levels of effort during a live performance can lead to particular affective states resulting in bodily arousals. Or, you can also use your body functionally, such as full-body swaying to facilitate keeping the groove or nodding your head to signal your bandmate to return to the tune’s main melody. From an enactive perspective, our perception is shaped by our actions. As such, cognition emerges not just through information processing but mainly from the dynamic interaction between the agent and the environment. All in all, we experience the music with our body, using more modalities than hearing, regardless if we perform or listen to it. 

Most musical artificial intelligence (AI) and multi-agent systems (MAS) focus on the music information found in the auditory domain. Modeling instrumental acoustics, synthesizing raw audio, or generating symbolic music data are highly complex tasks that AI can already accomplish to some extent. Still, it is unclear how these technologies can collaborate with musicking humans. How will machines perceive humans as diverse embodied entities, and how will humans communicate with machines exploiting multiple modalities? How can embodiment theories contribute to creating intelligent musical agents? At large, how will we make music with AI in the future? The interaction and artistic contexts, perceptual-motor constraints, affective states, environmental features, sensing devices, and computational systems are just a few that can come into play in an attempt to answer such questions.

An interdisciplinary research model encompassing natural sciences, humanities, cognition, and performing arts is often necessary to understand conventional forms of musical collaboration and create novel music technologies. Thus, in this two-day workshop, we will convene a group of scholars, artists, and engineers from diverse disciplines to emphasize embodied perspectives on musical human-AI interactions. Together we will explore theories and practices in this intriguing domain and discuss musical AI's past, present, and future through the lenses of embodied cognition.

Submissions

The two-day workshop will consist of thematic sessions in addition to two keynote lectures and one evening performance. We invite submissions for the thematic sessions. The aim is to encourage dialogue so that presenters will give short 10-minute presentations followed by a panel discussion. The proposals can include demos, completed projects, works-in-progress, and provocations. We solicit anything of relevance to the topic of Embodied Perspectives on Musical AI. Short proposal texts (200-300 words) can be submitted at: https://nettskjema.no/a/emai.

Important dates

• Abstract submission deadline: 1 September 2022 (AoE, UTC-12)
• Workshop notifications sent to authors: 21 September 2022
• Registration open: 28 September 2022
  • Go to the EmAI Participant Registration form (for non-presenters!)
• Announcement of the final program: 21 October 2022
• Workshop: 21-22 November 2022

Where

This workshop will be in a hybrid format, meaning you can choose to join us via Zoom or in person. The first day of the workshop will take place in Salen in the ZEB building, while the second day will be in Forsamlingssalen in Harald Schjelderups Hus.

Live Stream

Day 1

Day 2

Performances

Workshop program

All times are in Central European Time (CET), UTC +1 

Workshop convenors

Çağrı Erdem, Riccardo Simionato, Sayed Mojtaba Karbasi, Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Tech crew: Aleksander Tidemann, Pedro Pablo Lucas Bravo, Maham Riaz, Björn Thor Jónsson

Administration: Eirik Slinning Karlsen, Marit Johanne Furunes, Julie Øderud Danielsen