The Kansei Music System

Abstract

Our laboratory in Osaka has been studying pattern recognition techniques, under the direction of Seiji Inokuchi. We have two main research groups: (1) music and acoustics and (2) imaging technology. Our first musical research began in 1978, when we made a simple transcription experiment for database generation with the National Museum of Ethnology Museum in Japan (Nakamura and Inokuchi 1979). Our current music group is composed of five members, and we have been studying music information processing using our knowledge of music and signal processing. Our current main project is the construction of the music system, headed by Haruhiro Katayose. Kansei is a Japanese word that means sense, feeling, emotion, or sensitivity. It is a subjective concept, used in contrast to intelligence. Our goal is to construct a robotic system that can respond to music as a human musician does (Katayose et al. 1988). Musicians can play, write, read, and transform music in their brains into various media if they have some experience. Even if they are not trained musicians, listeners can appreciate music, and some may even compose simple pieces. We want to simulate such processes. The central problem is to make the machine feel music. Note that our goal is not to explain human feeling but to make the machine feel music as a human would.