OMaxist Dialectics: Capturing, Visualizing and Expanding Improvisations

OMax is an improvisation software based on a graph representation encoding the pattern repetitions and structures of a sequence, built incrementally and in real-time from a live Midi or Audio source. We present in this paper a totally rewritten version of the software. The new design leads to refine the spectral listening of OMax and to consider different methods to build the symbolic alphabet labeling our symbolic units. The very modular and versatile architecture makes possible new musical configurations and we tried the software with different styles and musical situations. A novel visualization is proposed, which displays the current state of the learnt knowledge and allows to notice, both on the fly and a posteriori, points of musical interest and higher level structures.