Jon Gillick

• PhD Student at University of California, Berkeley

We present a new data representation for music modeling and generation called a Flexible Grid. This representation aims to balance flexibility with structure in order to encode all the musical events (notes or rhythmic onsets) in a dataset without quantizing or discarding any temporal information. In experiments with a dataset of MIDI drum performa...

We introduce a new method for generating text, and in particular song lyrics, based on the speech-like acoustic qualities of a given audio file. We repurpose a vocal source separation algorithm and an acoustic model trained to recognize isolated speech, instead inputting instrumental music or environmental sounds. Feeding the "mistakes" of the voca...

We explore models for translating abstract musical ideas (scores, rhythms) into expressive performances using Seq2Seq and recurrent Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) models. Though Seq2Seq models usually require painstakingly aligned corpora, we show that it is possible to adapt an approach from the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) liter...

We investigate a speculative future in which we celebrate happiness by capturing laughter and representing it in tangible forms. We explored technologies for capturing naturally occurring laughter as well as various physical representations of it. For several weeks, our participants collected audio samples of everyday conversations with their loved...

In the context of an educational software tool that can generate novel jazz solos using a probabilistic grammar (Keller 2007), this article describes the automated learning of such grammars. Learning takes place from a corpus of transcriptions, typically from a single performer, and our methods attempt to improvise solos representative of such a st...

We are interested in educational software tools that can generate novel jazz solos in a style representative of a body of performed work, such as solos by a specific artist. Our approach is to provide automated learning of a grammar from a corpus of performances. Use of a grammar is robust, in that it can provide generation of solos over novel chor...

I will demonstrate the jazz improvisational capabilities of ImproVisor, a software tool originally intended to help jazz musicians work out solos prior to improvisation. As the name suggests, this tool provides various forms of advice regarding solo construction over chord changes. However, recent additions enable the tool to improvise entire choru...