Major: CAIRA - A Creative Artificially-Intuitive and Reasoning Agent in the Context of Ensemble Music Improvisation

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to engineer the Creative Artificially-Intuitive and Reasoning Agent CAIRA, an intelligent computer system designed for making decisions and producing creative work based on both reasoning and intuition ? the latter being the process of making a spontaneous decision when there is not sufficient time for reasoning. A network of humans and several CAIRA agents will be formed and studied to provide new understanding of learning and social interaction in dynamic environments where boundary conditions change over time and decisions have to be made within a given time interval. The project will use improvised avant-garde music to study the performance of the intelligent agent, but the outcome will be applicable to other time-based communication scenarios that require creative solutions and intelligent agents that can communicate naturally, as humans do. The machine listening abilities of CAIRA will be based on a music recognition system that simulates the human auditory periphery to perform an Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA), the process by which the auditory system extracts features such as pitch, timbre, and rhythm to organize sound into perceptually meaningful units. The simulation of cognitive processes will include a comprehensive cognitive calculus for reasoning and decision-making, and the system will also possess metareasoning, that is, an entity's ability to reflect upon its own reasoning. CAIRA's capacity for metareasoning will provide groundbreaking insight into the human willingness to systematically break rules and weigh the consequences in order to achieve a given goal, for example, to produce creative work. A machine correlate to human intuition will be another key component of CAIRA, and a major goal is to find out how different balances of reasoning and metareasoning on the one hand, and intuitive decisions, on the other hand, will lead to novel and captivating forms of creativity. Broader Impact: Based on a unique interdisciplinary approach between scientists and artists, and also engaging students from engineering and other fields in project-related courses, the project will help to better understand the process of artistic creation as a product of balancing different sources of creativity (e.g., rule-based reasoning approaches vs. intuitive decision-making). The general architecture of CAIRA will be useful for various musical applications, including automated composition systems and internet-based music performances with co-located ensembles. CAIRA will also provide an enhanced interaction with creative machines that will allow non-specialists and ability-impaired users to engage in expressive musical creation. Two examples include CAIRA's ability to automatically add musical texture or an accompaniment to a simple melody or to serve as a duet partner. Beyond this, the model will further our understanding of the human mind's ability to balance creative decisions based on spontaneity and immediate perception of an environment, to factor in environmental and social context, and to consider past training and learned stylistic rules in the creative process. This understanding will be applicable to similar complex problems, such as economic systems and semantic web services, as well as other problems where creative and timely solutions and/or natural human/computer communication are essential.