Constraints and Multimedia

The developing field of multimedia opens up a whole new class of applications for constraint techniques. The aim of this talk is twofold: show innovative applications of existing constraints techniques, and also show how the new landscape of multimedia raises new issues pertaining to constraint research and development. I will first outline the main results in so-called automatic harmonization, i.e. the use of constraints to generate music according to given inputs such as melodies or bass lines. I will then show how constraint perturbation techniques can be used to build interactive listening systems, especially for controlling sound source spatialization. Then I show an application of constraint satisfaction for creating music programs satisfying user preferences. I illustrate this idea on a prototype music program generation system