The first prize of 2500 euros is awarded to Simon Colton for his achievements in the field of generative music, by an international jury composed of Agoria, Greg Beller, Berrak Nil Boya, Andrea Faroppa, Georg Hajdu, Holly Herndon, Philippe Langlois, Frank Madlener, Miller Puckette and Anna Xambó, at the first edition of the generative music prize, organized by the IRCAM forum.

The Parley Classical Music Composition System
Parley is an AI system that we hope will be taken seriously as a classical music composer in its own right, one day. This involves solving numerous technical problems, but also raises societal issues around creative personhood, which we have begun to explore in a philosophical manner. The technical approach is neuro-symbolic, where we have combined the power of deep learning with the control afforded by rule-based systems. In particular, Parley can listen to the music it produces using neural listening models which tell it how each bar sounds in terms of genre, emotion, mood and situation. It can use the information about the sound of the music to both communicate particular elements as talking points and to improve the music to sound better in a particular respect. Parley celebrates and communicates the musical composition process, by producing various drafts of a composition as it is being made, and describing generative and editing processes along the way. It produces a video performance of each piece with talking points in margin notes, to stimulate discussion and user involvement in the music. Parley has been ported to a Colab notebook available at tinyurl.com/parleyV2 and is available for anyone to use.

First Prize