GiantSteps is a three-year European funded research project which seeks to overcome the limitations of current digital music production tools, and deliver a new generation of more powerful, inspirational, collaborative, affordable, user-friendly and efficient music creation systems, by combining intelligent expert agents and novel interface approaches. The GiantSteps’ tools, conceived for both laptop and low cost portable devices, address the needs of both professional and novel or casual music producers, by providing optimized workflows and by guiding users when they lack inspiration or technical or musical knowledge.
GiantSteps’ musical expert agents include supportive and inspirational systems and tools for melody, harmony, rhythm, structure or style, thus providing support from the sample to the song level. These systems are grounded on the latest findings in multimodal music information research (MIR) on symbolic, audio and metadata, as well as on recommendation strategies coming from music production practitioners. The GiantSteps project is still ongoing, and at Sonar+D we will showcase and demonstrate a combination of prototypes and commercial or ready-to-market products. These include tools for interactive rhythm variation, generation and manipulation, style-aware harmonic expert agents, or advanced sample browsers and recommenders.
The GiantSteps project has collected a strong balanced consortium including European leading music research institutions such as the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), the Department of Computational Perception at Linz’s Johannes Kepler University (Austria); leading industry partners like the music software and hardware manufacturer Native Instruments, the company specialized in interactive music technology Reactable Systems and JCP-Connect, the French company specializing in R+D in the telecommunications sector. Companies like STEIM, dedicated to music instrument research and development, and Yadastar the organizers of the Red Bull Music Academy.
