Improvisation & Computing Technology

I read Paul Nemirovsky's "Improvisational Media Space:: Architecture and Strategies for Evolution" tonight. It mentioned about how people do improvisation as well as how computing machines may be able to do it, for the purpose of providing human users inspirations during media creating processes. The term "media" right here can refer to text, music, audio, video, motion, and so on, while the author focuses on music improvisation here in this paper.

This piece of article is more than impressing to me. Truely, I was excited. All of a sudden I felt that my eyes are opened to something that is really interesting to me. And it appeared that something I really LOVE, in terms of academic research, would definitely be found, after all the years searching my real interests in the computing technology/science research playground. Improvisation to me is the process of making ideas flowing out from one's body, naturally, fluently, and neverendingly. The researchers working on signal-processing algorithms for digital music have done lots of efforts and surely some contribution, since those are the basics of all musical processing technology. But what is lacked in their work to me is the spirit of music. Musical technology is not only about making sound or identifying it. Recognizing and making use of music's characteristics of moving and touching people during the creating and performing process is something more important, in my personal point of view. Benefiting people in freeing them from struggling during the creation/performance and providing much easier ways to go, is something people need but not many solutions being provided for. I'm glad to see some work pursuing this direction. There are so many sentences in this paper speaking out my true belief in improvisation ( well, actually shared by the majority of musical improvisers), and it's the Media Lab's peculilarity here for me to make things that involve both humanity and engineering heavily. This is also the Media Lab's responsibility to the world in my perspective as well.