A warning! In a rare turn of events this post features a banjo not a guitar. Those of a sensitive disposition may wish to stop reading now, especially as it also features AI.

We have been continuing our experiments with performing with artificial intelligence as a musical partner. Our collaborator Marco Amerotti of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, has extended the Groover system from Post 118 and poetically renamed it Loeric. The new system can now vary the ornamentation, timing and pitches of notes as it plays a tune in response to how loudly a human partner is playing (whereas previously we explicitly communicated different ‘intensity levels’ using foot switches).

I gave it a spin at the inaugural concert of Nottingham’s new Interactive & Intelligent Music Technologies (I2MT) research group, alongside performances by Juan Martínez Ávila, Craig Vear, John Richards (AKA Dirty Electronics) and special guest Anna Xambó.

One tried and trusted strategy for finding out what a music technology can do is simply to crank the dials up to eleven and see what unfolds. Here’s a version of the traditional tune The Butterfly played by Loeric (on virtual ‘flute’) and myself (on physical tenor banjo), that features really quite extreme variations in timing and notes, with both parties listening to the other and varying their playing in response accordingly. My first impression as a player is that it is interactive and musical, but in a distinctly non-human way. Personally, I haven’t experienced this kind of musical dialogue with human players. It also sounds and feels somewhat like chasing after a butterfly as it flits around. Plenty to reflect on here as I work up to my next concert next month …