A Meta-Instrument for Interactive, On-the-Fly Machine Learning

Supervised learning methods have long been used to allow musical interface designers to generate new mappings by example. We propose a method for harnessing machine learning algorithms within a radically interactive paradigm, in which the designer may repeatedly generate examples, train a learner, evaluate outcomes, and modify parameters in real-time within a single software environment. We describe our meta-instrument, the Wekinator, which allows a user to engage in on-the-fly learning using arbitrary control modalities and sound synthesis environments. We provide details regarding the system implementation and discuss our experiences using the Wekinator for experimentation and performance.