PhD Programme [edit]

In 2007/8 I completed a PhD at CISA in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University. My supervisors were Alan Smaill and Michael Edwards. Read my thesis here

Musical Agents [edit]

Musical Agents are an emerging technology, designed to provide a range of new musical opportunities to human musicians and composers. However, current systems in this area lack certain features which are necessary for a high quality musician, in particular, they lack the ability to structure their output in terms of a communicative dialogue, and reason about the responses of their partners.

In order to address these issues, I have been developing Musical Act Theory (MAT). This is a novel theory, which models the use of performative actions in music, allowing a dialogue oriented analysis of music, and an exploration of intention and communication in the context of musical performance.

There are three main parts to this work: a formal logical system of Musical Acts, with influences from Speech Acts and Description Logics which gives a framework for agents to reason about the musical actions of their peers; a computational implementation of this theory, which allows for real-time musical interaction with humans; and experimentation in which pianists play duets with each other and with the system in order to test whether using this theory improves the perceived quality of interaction between humans and the agent system.

Code [edit]

All the code from my PhD is available on github: https://github.com/mo-seph/musicalAgents