The Smuse: a Situated Cognition Approach to Interactive Music Composition

The evolution of computer-based music systems has gone from computer-aided composition, which transposed the traditional paradigms of music composition to the digital realm, to complex feedback systems that allow for rich multimodal interactions. Yet, a lot of interactive music systems still rely on outdated principles in the light of modern situated cognitive systems design. Moreover, the role of human emotional feedback, arguably an important feature of musical experience, is rarely taken into account into the interaction loop. We propose to address these limitations by introducing a novel situated synthetic interactive composition framework called the SMuSe (for Situated Music Server). The SMuSe is based on the principles of parallelism, situatedness, emergence and emotional feedback and is built on a cognitively plausible architecture. It addresses questions at the intersection of music perception and cognition while being used as a creative tool for interactive music composition.