In my other life, I am a guitarist and tenor banjo player who enjoys playing traditional folk music. My own personal thread of practice-led research has been exploring the relationship between computing and traditional music. This began with ethnographic studies of traditional sessions and online folk clubs (during the COVID-19 pandemic). I created a unique acoustic guitar called Carolan that uses a digital technology called Artcodes to tell its life story, from how it was made, to the many places it has visited, players it has met, and songs and tunes it has performed. Recently, I have teamed up with Bob Sturm and Marco Amerotti at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, and Craig Vear (Nottingham), to develop LOERIC, an artificial intelligence performance partner that can that can improvise around traditional folk tunes in response to my playing.

Playing some music at the TAS Hub Showcase …

It’s @SteveBenford10 performing as we draw the first day of the #TASShowcase to a close. LOERIC is an AI that can perform, adjust and compose trad tunes in response to a human’s playing. pic.twitter.com/s6aOg9t5k9

— Kate Devlin (@drkatedevlin) March 5, 2024

Carolan Guitar Website

Papers

Amerotti, M., et al, A Live Performance Rule System informed by Irish Traditional Dance Music. 16th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research, Tokyo, 2023. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1795616/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Benford, S., Hazzard, A., Chamberlain, A., Glover, K., Greenhalgh, C., Xu, L., Hoare, M. and Darzentas, D., 2016, May. Accountable artefacts: the case of the Carolan guitar. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1163-1175). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858306

Benford, S., and Giannachi G., How a guitar started to self-document its ‘identity’ – the future of art documentation. In Documentation as Art (Dekker and Giannachi, eds). Routledge, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003130963 

Benford, S., Mansfield, P. and Spence, J., 2021, May. Producing liveness: The trials of moving folk clubs online during the global pandemic. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445125

Benford, S., Tolmie, P., Ahmed, A.Y., Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T., 2012, February. Supporting traditional music-making: designing for situated discretion. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 127-136). https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145227