papers

Publications (23)

cs.LG2021

Expressivity of Parameterized and Data-driven Representations in Quality Diversity Search

Alexander Hagg, Sebastian Berns, Alexander Asteroth +2

We consider multi-solution optimization and generative models for the generation of diverse artifacts and the discovery of novel solutions. In cases where the domain's factors of v…

cs.AI2018

Exploring Novel Game Spaces with Fluidic Games

Swen E. Gaudl, Mark J. Nelson, Simon Colton +5

With the growing integration of smartphones into our daily lives, and their increased ease of use, mobile games have become highly popular across all demographics. People listen to…

cs.LG2023

Towards Mode Balancing of Generative Models via Diversity Weights

Sebastian Berns, Simon Colton, Christian Guckelsberger

Large data-driven image models are extensively used to support creative and artistic work. Under the currently predominant distribution-fitting paradigm, a dataset is treated as gr…

cs.SD2024

Motifs, Phrases, and Beyond: The Modelling of Structure in Symbolic Music Generation

Keshav Bhandari, Simon Colton

Modelling musical structure is vital yet challenging for artificial intelligence systems that generate symbolic music compositions. This literature review dissects the evolution of…

cs.MM2019

Camera Obscurer: Generative Art for Design Inspiration

Dilpreet Singh, Nina Rajcic, Simon Colton +1

We investigate using generated decorative art as a source of inspiration for design tasks. Using a visual similarity search for image retrieval, the \emph{Camera Obscurer} app enab…

cs.SD2025

The Ghost in the Keys: A Disklavier Demo for Human-AI Musical Co-Creativity

Louis Bradshaw, Alexander Spangher, Stella Biderman +1

While generative models for music composition are increasingly capable, their adoption by musicians is hindered by text-prompting, an asynchronous workflow disconnected from the em…

cs.SD2024

Text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions

Keshav Bhandari, Abhinaba Roy, Kyra Wang +3

This paper introduces text2midi, an end-to-end model to generate MIDI files from textual descriptions. Leveraging the growing popularity of multimodal generative approaches, text2m…

cs.AI2023

Trash to Treasure: Using text-to-image models to inform the design of physical artefacts

Amy Smith, Hope Schroeder, Ziv Epstein +3

Text-to-image generative models have recently exploded in popularity and accessibility. Yet so far, use of these models in creative tasks that bridge the 2D digital world and the c…

cs.AI2020

Modelling serendipity in a computational context

Joseph Corneli, Anna Jordanous, Christian Guckelsberger +2

The term serendipity describes a creative process that develops, in context, with the active participation of a creative agent, but not entirely within that agent's control. While…

cs.AI2017

Off The Beaten Lane: AI Challenges In MOBAs Beyond Player Control

Michael Cook, Adam Summerville, Simon Colton

MOBAs represent a huge segment of online gaming and are growing as both an eSport and a casual genre. The natural starting point for AI researchers interested in MOBAs is to develo…

cs.AI2016

The Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate: A New Approach to Computational Creativity

Azlan Iqbal, Matej Guid, Simon Colton +3

We introduce a new artificial intelligence (AI) approach called, the 'Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate' (DSNS). It uses selected attributes from objects in various domains (e.g. c…

cs.SD2025

Scaling Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Symbolic Piano Performance

Louis Bradshaw, Honglu Fan, Alexander Spangher +2

We study the capabilities of generative autoregressive transformer models trained on large amounts of symbolic solo-piano transcriptions. After first pretraining on approximately 6…

cs.SD2025

ImprovNet -- Generating Controllable Musical Improvisations with Iterative Corruption Refinement

Keshav Bhandari, Sungkyun Chang, Tongyu Lu +4

Despite deep learning's remarkable advances in style transfer across various domains, generating controllable performance-level musical style transfer for complete symbolically rep…

cs.SD2025

Yin-Yang: Developing Motifs With Long-Term Structure And Controllability

Keshav Bhandari, Geraint A. Wiggins, Simon Colton

Transformer models have made great strides in generating symbolically represented music with local coherence. However, controlling the development of motifs in a structured way wit…

cs.SE2016

Semi-Automated Design Space Exploration for Formal Modelling

Gudmund Grov, Andrew Ireland, Maria Teresa Llano +3

Refinement based formal methods allow the modelling of systems through incremental steps via abstraction. Discovering the right levels of abstraction, formulating correct and meani…

cs.LG2021

Active Divergence with Generative Deep Learning -- A Survey and Taxonomy

Terence Broad, Sebastian Berns, Simon Colton +1

Generative deep learning systems offer powerful tools for artefact generation, given their ability to model distributions of data and generate high-fidelity results. In the context…

cs.AI2026

Coherence-Oriented Dream Scene Visualisation

Azra Açıl, Simon Colton

Dreams can be emotionally intense but difficult to communicate. We describe the Dream Scene Visualiser (DSV) system which turns written dream descriptions into a temporal sequence…

cs.AI2023

Exploring XAI for the Arts: Explaining Latent Space in Generative Music

Nick Bryan-Kinns, Berker Banar, Corey Ford +4

Explainable AI has the potential to support more interactive and fluid co-creative AI systems which can creatively collaborate with people. To do this, creative AI models need to b…

cs.CY2022

The Beyond the Fence Musical and Computer Says Show Documentary

Simon Colton, Maria Teresa Llano, Rose Hepworth +11

During 2015 and early 2016, the cultural application of Computational Creativity research and practice took a big leap forward, with a project where multiple computational systems…

cs.SD2026

Text2Score: Generating Sheet Music From Textual Prompts

Keshav Bhandari, Sungkyun Chang, Abhinaba Roy +4

Developing text-driven symbolic music generation models remains challenging due to the scarcity of aligned text-music datasets and the unreliability of automated captioning pipelin…

cs.LG2021

Automating Generative Deep Learning for Artistic Purposes: Challenges and Opportunities

Sebastian Berns, Terence Broad, Christian Guckelsberger +1

We present a framework for automating generative deep learning with a specific focus on artistic applications. The framework provides opportunities to hand over creative responsibi…

cs.SD2025

Aria-MIDI: A Dataset of Piano MIDI Files for Symbolic Music Modeling

Louis Bradshaw, Simon Colton

We introduce an extensive new dataset of MIDI files, created by transcribing audio recordings of piano performances into their constituent notes. The data pipeline we use is multi-…

cs.HC2022

Explainable Computational Creativity

Maria Teresa Llano, Mark d'Inverno, Matthew Yee-King +4

Human collaboration with systems within the Computational Creativity (CC) field is often restricted to shallow interactions, where the creative processes, of systems and humans ali…