The Moving Drone: Negotiating Agency Between the Voice and the Virtual
For practitioners of Hindustani music and interactive music systems, this work explores a novel artistic application of generative AI that prioritizes co-creativity over realism, though it is an incremental artistic contribution.
The paper presents 'The Moving Drone', a musical work where a traditionally static drone in Hindustani music is made dynamic through real-time looping and pitch shifting, and later through a low-fidelity generative AI model, creating an evolving feedback loop between the vocalist and virtual drone. The work intentionally uses low-fidelity AI outputs to necessitate human interpretation, positioning technology as a co-creative agent.
Melodic material in Hindustani music is presented in relation to a tonic, usually sustained by the tanpura, a four-stringed drone instrument. Rooted in Hindustani music, 'The Moving Drone' sets the traditionally static drone into motion that, throughout the performance, gains increasing agency transitioning from reactive to more proactive roles. The work employs four independent loopers in Max/MSP to function as 'virtual' drones. They are populated cyclically in real-time as the vocalist improvises, creating an organic and evolving feedback loop between the voice and the virtual drone. This relationship further evolves melodically by pitch shifting the loops, which introduces a dimension of sudden, explicit movement. Then it changes timbrally, via the integration of GaMaDHaNi, a singer conditioned pitch-to-voice generative AI model to resynthesize looped audio. While current music AI approaches prioritize high-fidelity and realism of generated content which has sparked anxiety over job replacement for the music community, this work intentionally utilizes low-fidelity generative outputs, further necessitating human interpretation and situational context in order to be complete. 'The Moving Drone' positions technology and generative AI within established socio-cultural musical practices, proposing a virtual drone as an active, responsive, and co-creative musical agent.