Dubnov, Karchkhadze, and Shao Win Award for "Interpreting Graphic Notation with MusicLDM: An AI Improvisation of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise"

"Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise is a landmark in the history of experimental music and graphic notation. Composed between 1963 and 1967, this work consists of 193 pages filled with abstract shapes, lines, and symbols that defy traditional musical interpretation. Lacking any conventional notation, Treatise offers performers freedom, allowingeach realization to be a unique artistic event. In this work we  leveraged OpenAI’s ChatGPT to interpret the abstract visual elements of Treatise, converting graphical images into descriptive textual prompts for MusicLDM, a pre-trained latent diffusion model designed for music generation. We introduce a technique called ”outpainting,” which overlaps sections of AI-generated music to create a seamless and cohesive composition. The paper demostrates a new perspective on performing and interpreting graphic scores, showing how AI can transform visual stimuli into sound and expand the creative possibilities in contemporary/experimental music composition..." (Dubnov).