GiantSteps - Seven League Boots for Music Creation and Performance

The GiantSteps project aims to create the "seven-league boots" for music production in the next decade and beyond. We envision digital musical tools that unleash the creative potential of practitioners by targeting three directions: Developing and integrating musical expert agents, supportive and inspirational systems for melody, harmony, rhythm, structure or style, providing suggestions from sample to song level, while guiding users when they lack inspiration or technical or musical knowledge. These systems will be based on the latest findings in multimodal music information research (MIR) on symbolic, audio and metadata, as well as on new recommendation strategies for the music production domain. Developing improved interfaces and paradigms for musical human-computer interaction and collaborative control of multi-dimensional parameter spaces, leading to intuitive, expressive and tangible input modalities. These interfaces will incorporate novel visualisation techniques that provide meaningful and relevant feedback to enable fast comprehensibility for novices and improved workflows for professionals. Addressing low cost portable devices by developing low complexity algorithms for music analysis and recommendation tailored to their capabilities. This will allow for beyond state of the art music analysis algorithms in affordable production tools and Apps that can be easily distributed and accessed by both professionals and amateurs. The GiantSteps project unites leading music research institutions, industrial R&D companies, and music practitioners, to combine techniques and technologies in new ways, including state of the art interface design techniques with MIR methods new in the areas of real time interaction and creativity. The consortium's industry partners will guarantee the alignment of these cutting edge technologies with market requirements.