The Cognitive Science Research Group Projects
Transforming Musicology
The "Transforming Musicology" project, funded by AHRC, is centred at Goldsmiths, University of London, but includes as research partners Queen Mary University of London, the University of Oxford and Lancaster University. This project, led by Prof Tim Crawford in the Computing Department of Goldsmiths, University of London, brings together 15 researchers to effect a Digital Transformation of the discipline of musicology. The world of music has been already transformed by the digital revolution. The same technology that has given unprecedented access to music for a vast and ever-growing international audience can open musicology up to the world - anyone and everyone can contribute by a variety of means enabled by that technology. We will show how the computational tools of music information retrieval (MIR) can be enhanced and adapted to the needs of musicologists, and how state-of-the-art developments in the Semantic Web can be exploited both to make their work more relevant and more sustainable, so that their methods can be easily re-used on new data. This project will stimulate creativity through multidisciplinary collaborative working. In the past, musicologists have tended to be lone scholars; regular collaboration in a multidisciplinary research environment will in future be essential for them to find what is "interesting" in potentially huge collections of music. We shall be using MIR tools in three main strands of research. Two of these are typical subjects for musicology and will be conducted by world-leading experts: 16th-century music and Wagnerian leitmotives. These will use state-of-the-art score- and audio-analysis techniques to extend the range of musicological investigation beyond the normal limitation to printed scores. We'll also be doing psychological work at Goldsmiths to study why leitmotives are so recognisable (or not). Our third main research strand is entirely novel, being nothing less than a prototype for a new 'musicology of the social media'. Music is now created, recorded, distributed, re-used and shared entirely online throughout the world and we will explore a whole new way of studying it and the online spread of musical ideas. Musicology should not be an 'ivory-tower' discipline; most people are interested in where music comes from, how it is conceived and made, how it affects us and society. Music goes on in people's minds, and the study of music is essentially about interactions between people. Because of this, music raises a complex mixture of philosophical, psychological and intellectual challenges; so it is a particularly fruitful domain for working through technical challenges which will be more widely applicable to the Digital Humanities and beyond.
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Promoting the Scientific Exploration of Computational Creativity (PROSECCO)
PROSECCO is a 3-year coordination action on the topic of Computational Creativity. It is funded by the 7th Framework Programme (FET Proactive initiatives and Fostering Interdisciplinary Dialogue). Computational Creativity (CC) is an emerging technology and maturing discipline that seeks to explore the capabilities of computers to perform tasks and assume responsibilities that would, if observed in a human producer, be considered "creative" by an unbiased judge. The goal of PROSECCO is to grow and nurture the field of CC research, by educating a new generation of CC researchers and by bringing existing researchers from neighboring disciplines into the fold. It will do this through a variety of exciting outreach mechanisms and engagements with the public, with academia, and with industry. The goal of the PROSECCO coordinating action is to perform outreach to these related research communities, in a way that maintains the coherence of the CC field without diluting its core principles. The following seven institutions are partners in PROSECCO: University College Dublin (IE) (project coordinator), Goldsmiths, University of London (UK), Universidade de Coimbra (PT), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (ES), Queen Mary, University of London (UK), Institut Josef Stefan (SLO), University of Helsinki (FI) PROSECCO activities will include: International Autumn School on Computational Creativity (November 18-22, 2013) Annual Contact Forum on Computational Creativity (first forum, February 2014) Code Camp on Computational Creativity(Summer 2015) Establishment of the Association of Computational Creativity Launching of a new Journal of Computational Creativity Publication of a Textbook on Computational Creativity Publication of a collected volume of canonical papers, titled Readings in Computational Creativity
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Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated (TEMI)
TEMI is a teacher training project with the aim to help transform science and mathematics teaching practice across Europe by giving teachers new skills to engage with their students, exciting new resources and the extended support needed to effectively introduce enquiry based learning into their classrooms. We do this by working with teacher training institutions and teacher networks across Europe where we wish to implement innovative training programmes called ‘enquiry labs’. These are based around the core scientific concepts and emotionally engaging activity of solving mysteries, i.e. exploring the unknown. The enquiry labs use scientists and communication professionals (e.g. actors, motivational speakers, etc.) to mentor teachers through the transition to use enquiry to teach science. TEMI adopts a clear definition of enquiry in terms of a cognitive skillset, and sets out a stepwise progression to push students towards becoming confident enquirers. The project pays equal attention to the affective side of learning. We will help teachers foster a deep motivation to learn, by bringing to the fore the sense of mystery, exploration and discovery that is at the core of all scientific practice. TEMI is a science education project addressed to secondary school teachers, funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), category Capacities, Science in Society, Coordination Action. Call identifier: FP7-SCIENCE-IN-SOCIETY-2012-1 Topic SiS.2012.2.2.1-1: Supporting actions on Innovation in the classroom: teacher training on inquiry based teaching methods on a large scale in Europe.
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Concept Creation Technology (ConCreTe)
This is a three year (2013 -2016) EU Collaborative project (3.2m euros). ConCreTe aims to study conceptual creativity in humans and machines. Hierarchical memory representations and techniques for conceptual blending are implemented in context of a cognitive architecture of creativity based on information theoretic measures. ConCreTe serves a long-term vision of computer systems that can behave in ways comparable with human creativity, autonomously and interactively, with better interaction between human and machine, better autonomous systems in general, and possibly creativity of new kinds, not yet exhibited by humans. We anticipate on-line creative learning environments, to teach or support creative pursuits and promote creativity in humans. We anticipate immersive gaming and edutainment systems that respond creatively to users’ actions. We anticipate reasoning systems that can propose new technology not intended by their designers. This becomes possible with computationally-creative reasoning when necessary domain knowledge is made available. We use Semantic Web technology to avoid the bottleneck of domain modeling, so creative reasoning can be ready in advance. We focus on mechanisms for generating examples in the creative domain from a learned model, and mechanisms for evaluating generated examples according to novelty and value. We develop AI methodology for creative systems, to exploit the potential of creative computational resources for society. We develop computer systems to simulate conceptualisation by study of deliberately guided methods. We develop computer systems that can conceptualise new meaning in terms of, but not restricted by, its existing knowledge. We develop and implement a cognitive architecture that simulates human creativity, study it as a creative entity in its own right, and behaviourally and neuroscientifically as a model of human creativity. We develop new evaluation methods for computational creativity founded in behavioural study and user responses of software distributed by our exploitation partner. Our partners are the University of Helsinki, Finland; University of Twente, The Netherlands; University of Coimbra, Portugal; Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Complutense University of Madrid, Spain; Chatterbox Labs Ltd, London, UK
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Learning to Create (Lrn2Cre8)
This is a three year (2013 -2016) EU Collaborative project (3.4m euros). Lrn2Cre8 aims to understand the relationship between learning and creativity by means of practical engineering, theoretical study, and cognitive comparison. We begin from the position that creativity is a function of memory, that generates new structures based on memorised ones, by processes which are essentially statistical. Thus, the project is situated in the tradition of frequentist statistical models of mind, and it builds on statistical understandings of perception of sequence (these are not naive 1st-order statistics) to consider its domain at the level of sequence processing in terms of percepts. Representations of these percepts are also learned, in parallel with the structural information in the data itself, and the guiding principle is one of information efficiency: the representations conspire to produce the most efficient possible representation of the data in memory. In Lre2Cre8, we wish to avoid the problem of extrinsic domain reasoning (e.g., physics in the real world) so we use music as our domain; extrinsic reasoning for music is small in comparison. We propose to build systems that take musical data as input, both in continuous and discrete forms, and learn the necessary representations and structure to memorise it efficiently. We hypothesise that this is a cognitive model of human musical behaviour, and we will test our hypthesis though empirical studies and experiments that compare the behaviour of our computational models with human behaviours. We will study the relationship between our well-understood and cognitively validated learning mechanisms and creative behaviour, in musical composition and performance. We aim to devise new methods for evaluation of creative behaviour in machines and humans, and to apply them, comparatively, to creative processes and outputs of the project. We aim ultimately to produce music which will be of genuine interest to society, and we will launch a record label to promote it as part of our evaluation methods. Our partners are University of Aalborg, Denmark; University of the Basque Country, Spain; Sony CSL, Paris, France; OFAI, Vienna, Austria; ReCompose GmbH, Vienna, Austria; Sony CSL, Paris, France.
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