CAMBRIDGE, MA–The IIT Association of Greater New England, known as IIT AGNE, is organizing a lecture on artificial intelligence titled: “Can an AI machine understand Indian Raga Music?”
The lecture will be presented by Kaustuv Ganguli, a professional vocalist, an engineer and a musicologist trained in the Hindustani music tradition.
His presentation will focus on advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and music recognition and include a demonstration of the AI Virtual musicologist. With the recent strides in AI, it is becoming easier for computers to recognize and compose music. But it raised some fundamental questions about what differentiates humans from automatons, organizers said.
There are some of the questions that will be discussed at the lecture: Can robots understand the nuances of Indian classical music? Can an AI add ‘human emotion’ to rhythm and harmony? Can they derive unique characteristics in a musical performance and savor it in the way a human music connoisseur can?
Ganguli has been a student of vocal maestro Pt. Ajoy Chakrabarty from the age 7, and is currently a scholar at ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata. He is pursuing his PhD in Electronic Systems (Dept. of Electrical Engineering) at the Indian Institute of Technology. His research interests include Audio Signal Processing, Music Information Retrieval, Emotion & Cognition, and Perception.
He is applying Artificial Intelligence techniques to analyze classical music and is also a part of the CompMusic project for computational models of world music discovery. He has received many awards for his musical talent and has published in numerous publications about his technical and musicological work.
When: April 26th 2017, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
Where: MIT, Stata Center, Room 32-155, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge MA
Register at: http://www.iitagne.org/
