Towards sentience: A path through jazz, datasets and digital scores

Poltronieri, Fabrizio; Vear, Craig

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.

Citation

Poltronieri, F., & Vear, C. (2024, June). Towards sentience: A path through jazz, datasets and digital scores. Paper presented at International Symposium of Electronic Art 2024, Brisbane, Australia

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: International Symposium of Electronic Art 2024
• Start Date: Jun 21, 2024
• End Date: Jun 29, 2024
• Deposit Date: May 15, 2024
• Keywords: Creative-AI, sentience, musicking, digital scores, jazz music
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/34862095
• Related Public URLs: https://isea2024.isea-international.org/welcome/