“Towards Sentience: A path through Jazz, Datasets and Digital Scores” presented by Poltronieri and Vear
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Sound (short papers)
Presentation Title:
- Towards Sentience: A path through Jazz, Datasets and Digital Scores
Presentation Subtheme:
- Speculative practices
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
This short paper is a provocation in which we lean into the notion of sentience in Creative-AI music. The purpose of this is to highlight that a critical component when using bucket terms such as “creativity”, “intelligence” or “sentience” in the design and deployment of artificial intelligence must be its context. The focus of this paper is a practice-based project called Solaris, a jazz quartet where three musicians are AI. Within its context we can claim that we achieved high levels of sentience. The paper starts with a brief discussion of the concept of sentience, positions our point of view and how we approach the concept, and then describes the artistic and technical processes used to build a novel dataset and to train our neural networks. We conclude with an account of the experience of playing alongside sentient artificial musicians and reaffirm the importance of context for the planning, design and utilisation of Creative-AI.
