Call for Participants (finished)

How would you like being able to create your own music either for entertainment, business, or for an artistic presentation? How do you evaluate your work especially when you create music by using software tools? We are pleased to announce RENCON (performance RENdering piano Contest) as a satellite workshop of ICAD2002.

More and more software tools become available every day to help us develop high-quality multimedia contents for business and personal activities. To provide high-quality multimedia contents that have some aesthetic or marketing values to the user, these tools should provide a framework of reflecting what you have in mind onto each medium. Creating such a framework necessitates combining results from several researches: it involves the break down of Kansei into components, qualification and quantification of these components, the investigation of the relationships, and mapping of these components into each medium as a physical device.

Performance rendering system is one such software tool that generates musical performance automatically from musical information. As for playing music as a human activity, we play music with musical knowledge, skill, and Kansei either consciously or unconsciously. The objectives of the system include rendering an expressive musical performance as if it were rendered by professional musicians. Because the system uses musical information, such as several types of structures that are embedded in a score as well as explicitly noted information, some problem solving methods of artificial intelligence are also helpful.

We need clear evaluation criteria for evaluating rendered music as well as a system to render it. RENCON is an attempt to provide an occasion for evaluating performance rendering systems in the style of piano Contest continuously. At (future) RENCON, systems first render a set piece as if young pianists were playing them at the Chopin Contest, and then we compare the rendered contents while the creators of the systems give technical presentations. The evaluation criteria should be based on both musical aesthetics and technical aspects and should assess the completeness, contribution, and importance of ideas.

Performance rendering thus combines a human task of understanding visual information (musical scores) with generating auditory information (musical performance) with knowledge and experience. This is nothing less than the sonification of images (musical scores) by humans. Thus it is a good start for RENCON to begin its history as a workshop of ICAD.