The Guitar That Plays Back: When AI Meets Improvisation
Guitarist Craig Scott creates music with a new guitar that learns as he plays, exploring how data shapes sound.
A new form of guitar that uses machine learning and curated data sets to partially control the instrument whilst it is played by an improvising musician - exploring how dataset bias affects real world outcomes.
Craig Scott is a composer, improvising guitarist and sound artist. Working with human performers, robotics, custom built digital and analogue hardware, his work is wildly inventive and reflects on the tension that exists between human and machine made music.
Craig Scott is the recipient of Watershed’s Patterns in Practice Artist Residency - an opportunity to develop ideas and conversations exploring data mining and machine learning. Craig has been resident at Pervasive Media Studio exploring our evolving human relationship with technological appendages, its effect on personal and collective mental health, perception of reality and how we relate to our own bodies, tools and each other.
The Residency is part of a wider Patterns in Practice research project led by the University of Sheffield and UWE Bristol, supported by DCRC and funded by UKRI.
About the Patterns in Practice research project
Patterns in Practice is a research project that seeks to enhance understanding of how human beliefs, values and feelings affect how we engage with data mining (the practice of analysing large databases in order to generate new information) and machine learning (computer systems that are able to learn and adapt without following explicit instructions, by using algorithms and statistical models to analyse and draw inferences from patterns in data).
After three years of talking with people in the fields of drug discovery, higher education and the arts – the partners in the project have gained a wealth of insight and material about the data cultures that emerge when information, machine processes and people come together.
This residency was an opportunity for Craig to delve into the research and develop artwork in response to what he found.
Credits
- Film by: Jack Offord and Jon Aitken
- Music by: Craig Scott
- Thanks to: Sambourne Bush, Erinma Ochu, Monica Wat, Duncan Speakman and Jake Gaule
