alchan-Looking Outwards 11

example of the Continuator (2000) by François Pachet in use, with Albert van Veenendaal on piano

The Continuator (2000) is a computational music generation system by Francois Pachet. It works in conjunction with a musician to improvise real-time musical sequences, creating melodies that may be indistinguishable to those played by the human musician (in the video shown, it’s being used as part of a “Musical Turing Test” to see if humans can tell the computer-generated music apart from the human-generated music).

I’m really interested in the way the Continuator works in conjunction with a musician, as it uses the musician’s playing as a reference point to come up with new but stylistically similar tunes. I like the idea of using algorithms in partnership with human creativity, as that seems to open up more possibilities than just trying to create an algorithm that will recreate human abilities perfectly.