Evaluating Co-Creativity using Total Information Flow

Abstract

Co-creativity in music refers to two or more musicians or musical agents interacting with one another by composing or improvising music. However, this is a very subjective process and each musician has their own preference as to which improvisation is better for some context. In this paper, we aim to create a measure based on total information flow to quantitatively evaluate the co-creativity process in music. In other words, our measure is an indication of how "good" a creative musical process is. Our main hypothesis is that a good musical creation would maximize information flow between the participants captured by music voices recorded in separate tracks. We propose a method to compute the information flow using pre-trained generative models as entropy estimators. We demonstrate how our method matches with human perception using a qualitative study.