2013: Ritwik Banerji & Joe Lasqo with Warren Stringer

Ritwik Banerji: saxophone, Maxine
Joe Lasqo: piano, Maxxareddu
Warren Stringer: live interactive video

Ritwik Banerji (ঋত্বিক ব্যানার্জী) and Joe Lasqo have worked with artificial intelligence concepts of “Improvising Agents” (i.e. improvising software musicbots). Ritwik has used insights from learning theory and his practice as an educator to decolonize musician-computer interaction on the basis of openness “to the possibilities that a computer is already intelligent (not merely in the process of becoming intelligent),” resulting in the creation of his software musical collaborator, Maxine.

Joe Lasqo has applied experience from prior AI work in expert systems and natural language/speech processing to the development of Maxxareddu, a musical software entity using blackboard architectures, NLP algorithms and grammars for the purposes of musical improvisation.

They’ll join the improvising agents’ conversation on acoustic instruments (Banerji on saxophone, and Lasqo on piano) in the improvisational dance of decisions taken by humans and decisions taken by software.

Ritwik Banerji (ঋত্বিক ব্যানার্জী) is an improvising saxophonist and designer/mentor/student of Maxine, an autonomous software-based musical agent. He is currently a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in ethnomusicology. His research interests focus on the development of artificial improvising agents which would “pass for” human improvisers of post-jazz styles. In this project, Maxine serves as co-ethnographer, allowing for the explicitation of an improviser’s values, expectations, and aesthetics of real-time musical interaction. Maxine appeared in early 2009 as a being, deeply inspired by Banerji’s work with children in Chicago. Like one would hope of a child, this project focuses on the creation of a social agent, finding ways through sound to make its presence known, while respecting and enhancing the presence of others. Recently this project has more strongly engaged the issue of astromusicology, or the real-time musical diplomacy between human sound makers and the spectral bodies of Maxine.

Joe Lasqo studied classical music in India, computer music at MIT, Columbia and at UC Berkeley’s CNMAT as well as being a long-time performing jazz musician who has lived (and listened) in several East Asian countries, and now lives in San Francisco. He plays piano and keyboards, percussion, and Max/MSP as a solo performer and in collaborations with musicians and instrument-inventors. Besides loving and playing the traditional musics of Asia and elsewhere with some very non-traditional instrumentation, he also uses Asian tools to build music with the compositional advances and new concepts of jazz and 20th-century music--Stockhausen-type tone or timbre rows developed in Indian composition/improvisation structures, atonal and/or non-octave ragas, stochastic tala structures, ragam-tanam-pallavi leadsheets, and shakuhachi and gagaku pieces transmigrated into 21st-century bodies. He is also a software engineer working in systems development, systems for natural language processing, speech processing, and multilingual computing.

Artist (photo by Photographer)