356-winter-2023/hw3

Programming Etude #3: "Wekinate Your World"

Music and AI (Music356/CS470) | Winter 2023 | by Ge Wang

In this programming etude, you are using Wekinator to create three interactive AI utilities/toys in your everyday life! These don't have to be useful; in fact, whimsical is good! Absurd is probably good! Playful is wonderful!

Due Dates

• Final Deliverable: webpage due Monday (2/27, 11:59pm)
• In-class Presentation: Tuesday (2/28)

Discord Is Our Friend

• direct any questions, rumination, outputs/interesting mistakes to our class Discord

Things to Think With

• some relevant readings (including from your Critical Response #2 assignment)
  • "Power to the People: The Role of Humans in Interactive Machine Learning"
  • "Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems"
  • Real-time Human Interaction with Supervised Learning Algorithms for Music Composition and Performance

Tools to Play With

• get and play with Wekinator
• get the latest bleeding edge secret chuck build (2023.01.23 or later!)
  • macOS this will install both command line chuck and the graphical IDE miniAudicle, and replace any previous ChucK installation.
  • Windows you will need to download and use the bleeding-edge command line chuck (for now, there is no bleeding-edge miniAudicle for Windows); can either use the default cmd command prompt, or might consider downloading a terminal emulator.
  • Linux you will need to build from source, provided in the linux directory
  • all platforms for this project, you will be using the command line version of chuck.
• NOTE: to return your chuck back to a pre-bleeding-edge state, you can always install the latest official ChucK release

Your Task

• observe and identify three activities or tasks you like to "wekinate" (i.e., design an small interactive AI system)
• of the three, at least one should be an expressive musical instrument using Wekinator for regression
• once again, these don't have to be useful; instead, playfulness, whimsicality, and/or expressiveness are the virtues here
• deploy these in some everyday context; feel free to involve those around you (e.g., roommates! friends! enemies!) in testing out your AI systems!

Sample Code

• Wekinator examples
• sample code in ChucK

A Few Bad Ideas!

• Using camera input and sound output, create a day / night classifier (or sonifier)—I mean, who has time to look out the window?
• An instrument using one or more continuous input (such as mouse, gamepad, gametrak, Kinect, wiimote, VR controller with or without the VR) controlling a multi-parameter synthesis (like one of the STK instruments like Bowed)—try playing this for your roommate, or your cat (and film the performance and audience reception)
• using Wekinator's dynamic time warping, train a few audio or other gestures, and create a voice command system that does meaningless things—inject a little AI-mediated chaos into your day
• for more ideas, check out these projects (some of these are large-scale projects; for this programming etude, remember to keep the scope of your Wekinate creations small)!

Reflections

• write ~300 words of reflection on your etude. It can be about your process or the products. Tell us about your attempt to deploy them.

Milestone Deliverables

submit a webpage for the project so far, containing:

• a brief report of what you did / try / observed in Phase One, and a brief description of your experiments on in Phase Two so far
• a demo video (doesn't have to be polished) briefly documenting your experiments/adventures in Phase Two, and a very preliminary sketch of Phase Three (a creative statement or performance using your system)
• code and feature and usage instructions needed to run your system
• list and acknowledge the source material (audio and any video) and people who have helped you along the way; source audio/video do not need to be posted (can submit these privately in Canvas)
• In class, we will view your webpage/demo video and give one another feedback for this milestone.

Final Deliverables

• create a CCRMA webpage for this etude
  • the URL should live at https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~YOURUSERID/356/hw3 or https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~YOURUSERID/470/hw3
  • alternately, you may use Medium or another publishing platform (but please still link to that page from your CCRMA webpage)
• your webpage is to include
  • a title and description of what you made (free free to link to this wiki page)
  • three video recordings corresponding to your three interactive AI systems in action
  • all relevant code and data files for all three systems
  • brief report on how you created these
  • your 300-word reflection
  • any acknowledgements (people, code, or other things that helped you through this)
• submit to Canvas only your webpage URL