Reinforcement learning and the creative, automated music improviser

  • Authors:
  • Benjamin D. Smith;Guy E. Garnett

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States

  • Venue:
  • EvoMUSART'12 Proceedings of the First international conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Automated creativity, giving a machine the ability to originate meaningful new concepts and ideas, is a significant challenge. Machine learning models make advances in this direction but are typically limited to reproducing already known material. Self-motivated reinforcement learning models present new possibilities in computational creativity, conceptually mimicking human learning to enable automated discovery of interesting or surprising patterns. This work describes a musical intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning model, built on adaptive resonance theory algorithms, towards the goal of producing humanly valuable creative music. The capabilities of the prototype system are examined through a series of short, promising compositions, revealing an extreme sensitivity to feature selection and parameter settings, and the need for further development of hierarchical models.