Aurelien Antoine

Biography

AHRC-Funded 3D3 PhD Computer Music Researcher 'An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Timbre Perception and Musical Orchestration' Researchers have investigated harnessing computers as a tool to aid in the composition of music for over 70 years. In major part, such research has focused on creating algorithms to work with pitches and rhythm, which has resulted in a selection of sophisticated systems. Although the musical possibilities of these systems is vast, they are not directly considering another important characteristic of sound. Timbre can be defined as all the sound attributes, except pitch, loudness and duration, which allow us to distinguish and recognize that two sounds are dissimilar. This feature plays an essential role in orchestration as it involves mixing instrumental properties to produce musical pieces. Within this thesis, we explore harnessing aspects of musical timbre for intelligent computer-aided orchestration systems. This project investigates the link between musical timbre, auditory perception and psychoacoustics for orchestral sounds. It resulted in choosing to use verbal descriptors of timbral qualities to represent auditory perception of orchestral sounds. Therefore, this research reports on the developments of methods and tools designed to automatically retrieve and identify perceptual qualities of timbre within orchestral sounds, using specific musical acoustic features and artificial intelligence algorithms. Different perceptual experiments have been conducted to evaluate the correlation between selected acoustics cues and humans’ perception. Results of these evaluations confirmed the potential and suitability of the presented approaches. Finally, these developments have helped to design a perceptually-orientated computer-aided orchestration system harnessing aspects of artificial intelligence.

Research Interest

Computer Music; Computer-Aided Composition/Orchestration; Musical Timbre; Intelligent Systems; Generative Systems