Place: Duthie Center, Room 117
Date: Friday, February 5, 2010
Reception: 3:00 – 3:30pm, Duthie Center 2nd Floor
Seminar 3:30

"Virtual singer, Emotion & metaplasticity concept"
Jocelyne Kiss

Associate Professor in computer arts in the arts & technologies department, University Paris East France. She was previously assistant professor in the Image technologies and virtual reality department University Paris 8. She studies the way to simulate a compositional gesture in order to reproduce some traits of human behavior. She is interested in understanding more comodality & Ipseity concepts & their implication in learning and memory process. Her Thesis was on music composition & cognitive sciences.

Summary

A 3D interactive facial animated avatar was made thanks to virtools software. The main originality of this virtual singer is to develop his own melody by using learning machines and constantly improve his musical style and emotions. Cerberus is implemented using competitive learning rules to trained artificial neural networks in order to perform these self-improvements. Self-improvements is a key of our learning capacity, The challenge of building a virtual singer that could promotes his own improvisation is an open research field.We will expose the difficulties of the synchronization in real-time between the voice and animation to generate the right emotion, also the difficulties of establishing a classification which could be in contradiction with the ontology of the musical fact. Also we will expose the necessity of developing avatars that use the amazing potentialities of spike-timing-dependent plasticity concept, that hence metaplasticity. This powerful concept enhance the potentiality of avatar design and give the impression that the avatar has a memory and simulate "feelings" linked to a context.