Beyond Reflexivity: Mediating between imitative and intelligent actions in an interactive music system

In this paper we describe some interaction strategies employed by the Jambot – an interactive music system that we have recently developed. In particular we outline three approaches that the Jambot uses to mediate between imitative and intelligent actions. The approaches are (i) mode switching based on confidence of understanding, (ii) filtering and elaboration of imitative actions and (iii) measured deviation from imitative action according to a salient parametrisation of the action space. These approaches operate from a baseline of transformed imitation, and utilise moments of confident understanding to deviate musically from this baseline. We present an abstract description of the properties required to apply these approaches in more general computational agents, and suggest that they may be useful outside of the music domain, particularly in non-verbal communication for affective conversational agents.