Guided improvisation as dynamic calls to an offline model

This paper describes a reactive architecture handling the hybrid temporality of guided human-computer music improvisation. It aims at combining reactivity and anticipation in the music generation processes steered by a “scenario”. The machine improvisation takes advantage of the temporal structure of this scenario to generate short-term anticipations ahead of the performance time, and reacts to external controls by refining or rewriting these anticipations over time. To achieve this in the framework of an interactive software, guided improvisation is modeled as embedding a compositional process into a reactive architecture. This architecture is instantiated in the improvisation system ImproteK and implemented in OpenMusic.