When
Thematic Session 1: Design and Interaction (Monday, 14:15)
Abstract
I will present how recents advances in Artificial Intelligence are helping us design wooden musical instruments. I will talk about wood, and how wood is used to make instruments that let humans make music. And how we can use AI to build instruments, select wood, design meta-materials for specific functions, and how to track those musicking humans as to figure out what they like of a given instrument. In this talk I will review our latest results and present the future perspectives, and how AI could be used for the creation of perception-optimised instruments in the near future. Finally, it may help us understand, from an embodied perspective, what makes an instrument preferable to another for a particular player. The central hypothesis of this talk is that it is not in the soundwave, but rather in the interaction between body and object, where the secret of a good instrument lies. This interaction is rather opaque to consciousness and only by looking at the body of the player, with the help of AI, can we understand it.
Bio
Sebastian Gonzalez got his PhD in physics of granular media in The Netherlands. Soon after graduation he started learning instrument making with a German family that’s been making violins since 1700. Mixing traditional craftsmanship and the most advanced computational methods, he studies how science can shed light in craft as old as science itself.