OMax: Real-Time Machine Improvisation

OMax is a software environment which learns in real-time typical features of a musician's style and plays along with him interactively, giving the flavor of a machine co-improvisation. It is based on a research on stylistic modeling carried out by Head Sc. & Tech of Music and Sound Lab at IRCAM, Gerard Assayag, and CREL director, Shlomo Dubnov, and a research on improvisation with the computer by G. Assayag, M. Chemillier and G. Bloch (Aka the OMax Brothers).

OMax re-injects in several different ways the musician's material that has gone through a machine-learning stage, allowing a semantics-level representation of the session and a smart recombination and transformation of this material in real-time. We coined the term Stylistic Reinjection to express this particular way of interacting of one's own clone.

Now in its fourth version, entirely rewritten as a modular architecture of objects for Max/PSP, OMax is developed by Benjamin Levy and it is the center of his ongoing PhD.
This research was funded 2004-2005 by a grant from the French Ministry of Research: Creation of Scientific Mediation Products on the Internet It gives alively explanation of the concept of stylistic modeling and recreation that is underneath OMax.