DIGITAL MAESTRO

摘要

Making music can often become a battle of egos. Now a group of musician-scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, has a solution: a computer program that decides how each musician will contribute. Saxophonist-acoustician Jonas Braasch and his col- leagues wrote the program to aid them with their unusual improvisation sessions, in which groups of five or more musicians in up to four places around the world jam via the Internet. To keep everyone in sync, they tried having one musician conduct the troupe. But unfortunately, even with video monitors showing the remote groups, conductors kept favoring performers within their own groups.