Ricercar is an interactive AI-based music composition system. The word Ricercar refers to a musical form of the Baroque and Renaissance and means “to search out” in its Italian origin. Composers used this term for pieces in which they experimented with a theme or musical idea and discovered its qualities such as permutation and variation possibilities as well as its harmonic potential.
Ricercar: An AI-based Musical Companion follows a similar idea. It aims to create an intuitive interface between human artists and an AI-based composition system, where human users and the AI system can discover the potential of a musical idea (given to the system by the users or initialized by the system itself) in a collaborative way. The interaction takes advantage of the benefits of artificial creativity, together with the ability to control and personalize the output of the system by human users.
Ricercar interface demonstration:
Performance of the piece “Sounding Letters”, composed with the help of Ricercar:
Ricercar as part of the SonoSynthesis project:
Credits
Ars Electronica Futurelab: Ali Nikrang
Ricercar is a winner project of the 2020 Ars Electronica Futurelab Ideas Expedition