Musical Virtuosity and Creativity - Computers and Creativity - page 139

Fig. 5.31 A possible intentional score inferred from the phrase of Fig. 5.7 . TP denotes the mean
MIDI pitch for each beat
Fig. 5.32 A phrase generated on the same chord sequence as Fig. 5.7 , with the intentional score
induced from John McLaughlin's chorus in Fig. 5.31 , consisting only of target pitches at every
beat, as indicated
This score can be used to generate the phrase illustrated in Fig. 5.32 . It can be
seen that the resulting phrase follows approximately the same pitch contour. The
phrase is not the same, as it uses only the note patterns of our training set, but it
gives an indication of how to exploit intentional scores in a creative way.
5.6 Virtuoso: A Virtuoso Enabling Interactive System
Virtuoso is an interactive musical system that implements the ideas presented here
so that a user can experience the sensation of being a virtuoso, without having to be
one himself. Virtuoso is a jazz chorus generator that is controllable in real-time using
arbitrary input controllers. The main features we have introduced that account, from
our point of view, for a substantial part for the virtuoso aspects of jazz (side-slips
and high-level control) are mapped to various gestural controls, including start, stop,
speed (number of notes per beat), side-slips, as well as several criteria to control the
generation as described in Sect. 5.5.2 .
Several videos (Virtuoso 2011 ) show the author using the system, as well as in-
tentional scores deployed during the improvisation. A number of experiments were