Co-Creatives Spaces: The machine as a collaborator

Abstract

People have always used new technology to experiment with new forms of music creation. However, the latest devel- opments in artificial intelligence (AI) suggest that machines are on the verge of becoming more than mere tools—they can also be co-creators. In this article, we follow four mu- sicians in the project Co-Creative Spaces through a six- month-long collaborative process, where they created mu- sic by improvising with each other and with computer-based imitations of themselves. These musical agents were trained through machine learning to generate output in the style of the musicians. What happens to musical co-creation when AI is included in the creative cycle? The musicians are from Norway and Kenya—two countries with fundamentally dif- ferent musical traditions. How is the collaboration affected by cultural biases inherent in the technology, and in the musicians themselves?

These questions were examined through focus groups as part of two five-day workshops. Analysis shows how the musicians moved between an understanding of machine as tool and machine as co-creator, and between the idea of music as object and music as process. These different inter- pretative repertoires were used interchangeably and paint a complex picture of what it is like being in the intersection between different musical and cultural paradigms.