A Computer Participant in Musical Improvisation

the changing roles of participants in a musical improvisation and synchronously generate appropriate contributions of its own. Musical improvisation is a collaborative activity analogous to conversation. Both are sequences of spontaneous utterances constructed within a collaborative structure that is interactively managed by the participants. Based on results from conversation analysis, I have constructed a computer improvisor that participates in small group improvisation. Using conversation analysis rules for turn-taking, the computer tracks the roles of the other musicians and follows a structural model of the improvisation to determine its own role as the improvisation unfolds. User-centered design was crucial to the successful development and deployment of the system. Many human-computer interaction researchers have concluded that people regard interactive computer systems as social actors [17, 22]. In Lucy Suchman's study of human interactions with photocopiers [21], copier user..