Evaluating Musical Metacreation in a Live Performance Context

Abstract

We present an evaluation study of several musical metacreations. An audience that attended a public concert of music performed by string quartet, percussion, and Disklavier was asked to participate in a study to determine its success: 46 complete surveys were returned. Ten compositions, by two composer/programmers, were created by five different software systems. For purposes of validation, two of these works were human-composed, while a third was computerassisted: the audience was not informed which compositions were human-composed. We briefly discuss the different systems, and present the artistic intent of each work, the methodology used in gathering audience responses, and the interpreted results of our analyses.