Course description
CCCP (Co-Creative Communication Platform) is an interactive music system that can play alongside musicians in an open-ended and improvisatory manner. The software is able to change its interactive behavior depending on what it "hears" in the audio input. Sometimes, it will try to follow the musician. Other times, it will mirror back contrasting responses or even try to lead the human player along into unexpected musical segues. The interface is designed not for control, but for negotiation. Musical agents can be trained on audio corpuses, making them virtual co-performers or "brainstorming bots".
In this workshop, you will get an introduction to the CCCP environment and the underlying principles. There will be a demonstration of how musical agents are trained, and Notto will play a short showcase set so you can see how it works in practice. Participants are also free to try and play with it using a MIDI keyboard, a guitar or their own voice.
Target audience
Anyone interested in music and/or music technology
Learning outcomes
- An understanding of how CCCP works
- Ability to curate your own datasets and train musical agents
- Substantial knowledge for further exploration with CCCP
Prerequisites
- Entry level: Beginner
- You do not need to be experienced with music technology to join the workshop.
Technical and Material Requirements
It is possible to join the workshop as a curious onlooker without using the software. The following requirements are for participants who want to learn the software and begin exploring developing their own musical agents:
- Mac laptop (OS X 10.14 or above)
- Max from Cycling 74 installed (Max 8 or above): https://cycling74.com/ The software interface does not require the user to know how to use Max. You can use a 30-day free trial to run the software. If so, do not activate the trial before December 9.
- Preferably, a dataset with audio files (wav) for training. We will also have some datasets ready if you prefer not to make your own.
- It is recommended to download this GitHub repo before the workshop: https://github.com/co-creative-spaces/cccp/tree/AIMC2025/agents/SpireMuse_CCCP Go through the installation instructions in README if you want to prepare beforehand.
If you have any questions regarding these requirements, please contact Notto J. W. Thelle via notto@oslomet.no
Lunch
- There will be a complementary buffet-lunch at 12:00-13:00 from the Sverdrups spiseri (Georg Sverdrups Hus, 2nd floor).
- After you get your lunch, join us at Store møterom where we have reserved seats for #DSDays2026 participants.
Number of participants
After the soft deadline, a waiting list will be automatically handled upon de-registrations.
Contact
If you have any questions regarding this course, or anything else about the DSDays 2026 event, please contact us per email: digitalscholarship@ub.uio.no