Musical performance questions invention versus imitation

The event, Invention versus Imitation, is a co-creation of Richard Rentsch and José Miguel Fernández, a researcher and composer from the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), where the SOMAX software was developed by the 'RepMus' team supported by the ERC project REACH. It is part of a years-long project on creativity that Rentsch manages at the Fondation Agalma in Geneva.

The musical performance will take place as part of the College of Humanities’ weeklong Les Culturellesfestival, lasting roughly 30 minutes and using two pianos: one played by Rentsch, and one controlled by SOMAX that will ‘improvise’ music to accompany the composer. The music will be created in real-time and not prerecorded. No one, including Rentsch or Fernández, knows what the musical outcome will be.

“The idea is to look at how to improvise, the way two musicians would, but instead we’ll be experiencing improvisation between a human musician and a machine,” Fernández says.

The performance will be followed by a roundtable with Rentsch and Fernández, who will be joined by psychoanalyst François Ansermet, professor of information and communication sciences Franck Renucci, neuropsychiatrist Valeria Vianello Dri,and philosopher Claude Welscher, to discuss the experience and explore the questions it brings up. Two EPFL computer science students will also give their analysis of the musical performance.

“It’s a first step,” explains Rentsch, who has been doing work for years to investigate the nature of creativity. “At this performance, we are using music to ask ourselves this question of invention versus imitation.”

A duet between human and machine

During the performance, Rentsch will play three pieces of music: one of his own compositions, an improvisation on a jazz standard and a complete improvisation. The AI-enabled mechanical piano will react to each piece, and for the final piece, Rentsch and the SOMAX piano will play a duet together.

SOMAX is not generative AI like Chat GPT for example. Fernández calls it “pseudo-artificial intelligence” as it does not use deep neural networks. Instead, SOMAX has a memory built from listening to Rentsch’s playing in the past and using statistics to say that if, for example, he plays a G note, then it is more likely that he will play a D next. And then SOMAX will respond with something similar from its memory.

Throughout the performance, Fernández will be on the side of the stage monitoring and controlling the AI by adjusting different parameters, such as when the SOMAX piano plays and when it remains quiet.

“There still needs to be someone playing with the software in the role of interpreter,” he says, “because at the moment, the software isn’t intelligent enough to adapt on its own.”

“We have to change the paradigm”

Much of the debate surrounding AI often boils down to, is it good or bad? For Rentsch and Fernández, what is important about this event are the bigger, more complicated questions it poses. Rentsch stresses the fact that this performance isn’t about humans versus machines.

“We have to change the paradigm,” Rentsch says. “I didn’t want an evening of the same question: ‘for or against AI?’ We should focus instead on the result.” Rentsch also doesn’t want a simple comparison of better or worse between the human musician and AI; he sees the sounds that SOMAX creates in response as something else entirely.

Rentsch also stresses the importance of doing this ‘experiment’ as a live concert with an audience, as a performance is an open system because due to the many variables that change the experience: the light, the space, the temperature, and of course, the audience themselves.

“Anyone who wants to interrogate this system is welcome,” he says.

Overall, the performance will likely ask more questions than it answers, which for Rentsch is precisely the point. “It opens so many unbelievable questions about human beings,” he says. “What makes us a singular species? What is unique about humans? What is the importance of the body? What is creativity? What is intelligence? The machine will be interrogating us.”