Unnatural selection

Iterative unit selection with unnatural prosody detection

Corpus-driven speech synthesis is hampered by the occurrence of occasional glitches which ruin the impression of the whole utterance. We propose an iterative unit selection integrated with an unnatural prosody detection model to identify any unnatural prosody. The system searches an optimal path in the lattice, verifies its naturalness by the unnatural prosody model and replaces the bad section...

Natural and Unnatural Selection in a Wild Goose

Generative Music for Live Musicians: An Unnatural Selection

An Unnatural Selection is a generative musical composition for conductor, eight live musicians, robotic percussion, and Disklavier. It was commissioned by Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble, and premiered in May 2014. Music for its three movements is generated live: the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material is based upon analysis of supplied corpora. The traditionally notated music is displa...

Unnatural Selection: Seeing Human Intelligence in Artificial Creations

As generative AI systems grow in sophistication, so too do our expectations of their outputs. For as automated systems acculturate themselves to ever larger sets of inspiring human examples, the more we expect them to produce human-quality outputs, and the greater our disappointment when they fall short. While our generative systems must embody some sense of what constitutes human creativity if...

Unnatural Selection of Antarctic Toothfish in the Ross Sea, Antarctica

Historically, fishermen targeted fish in shallow, nearshore waters relatively close to port (Pauly et al. 2005). As these species became depleted, to meet growing demands, fishermen were forced to move offshore and into deeper waters (Hutchings and Reynolds 2004; Koslow et al. 2000; Morato et al. 2006; Hilborn et al. 2003; Pauly et al. 2002, 2005). Steady advances in fishing technology facilita...