At our last workshop, Valerio Velardo, gave us an insight into his personal “unexpected journey to art and music”. He is co-founder and CEO of Melodive, which use AI to develop a music system that is able to automatically generate soundtracks for VR and video games. A quote that especially caught out attention during the talk was the following:
“The [composer] is, in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the
potential and capacities of the brain, though with different tools.”
– Semir Zeki
In other words, the composer has a conscious understanding of how we work and uses all the components to manipulate our emotional state and our experience.
The way we perceive is contained by who we are, the biology we are consisting of, moreover our past and impressions we gained thought our lives influences how we experience music. Nevertheless, there is also something universal about it – one could guess that one could predict how people will response to certain types of music. Upon this line of thought, Melodrive was built. Melodive Indie is an engine that produces non-linear motion driven video game music in real time. It extracts game parameters such as health levels of the character or the space (i.e. objects like the shark approaching you):
Another question we discussed that night was: What might the future of the arts look like? In the second part his talk, Valerio presented his idea that art might be defined by co-creation instead of full generation. He imagines, that the future we might see combinations of AI systems with composers and artists in that AI can augment a creative capacity. In this line he presented KanTor, an artistic VR experience with which you can fly through 9 worlds inspired by abstract art:
