Ryan Groves - Building Artificially Intelligent Musical Composers - CCRMA Open House 2017 Keynote

Ryan Groves is an award-winning music researcher and veteran developer of intelligent music systems. In this CCRMA Open House 2017 Keynote Talk, Ryan will present some of the challenges faced when trying to build artistic machines. Through his work on Ditty, the automated musical messenger, as well as his work on creating adaptive musical scores for video games at Melodrive, Ryan will highlight the different musical components of the vast topic of automatic musical composition. Given his background of computational music theory, he will emphasize the importance of building and validating machine-learning models that can perform particular musical tasks, and leveraging those to create artificially intelligent compositional agents.

Biography: Ryan received his B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA, and continued on to complete a Master's in Music Technology from McGill University. As the former Director of R&D for Zya, he developed a musical messenger app that automatically sings your texts, called Ditty. Ditty won the Best Music App of 2015 by the Appy Awards. In 2016, his research in computational music theory was awarded the Best Paper of the most prominent music technology conference, ISMIR. With his new venture, Melodrive, he and his co-founding team of two PhDs in Music and AI are looking to build the world's best artificially intelligent composer, and to change the way music is experienced in video games and virtual environments.