C4DM Seminar: Nithya Shikarpur: Towards Generative Modeling and Interactive Performance for Hindustani Music and beyond
QMUL, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Centre for Digital Music Seminar Series
Seminar by: Nithya Shikarpur
Date/time: Wednesday, 22th October 2025, 3.30pm
Location: Hybrid. Peter Landin building, room 4.24
Teams meeting info: Meeting ID: 324 267 638 748 , Passcode: 7sV9PL6k
Title: Towards Generative Modeling and Interactive Performance for Hindustani Music and beyond
Abstract: Recent advances in generative music modeling open up rich avenues for creative exploration and expression. As both a musician and researcher, my work focuses on two interconnected goals: (1) developing generative models that meaningfully engage with the musical context and aesthetics of specific traditions, and (2) designing interactive systems that foster creative collaboration between humans and generative models. First, I will introduce GaMaDHaNi, a hierarchical generative model for Hindustani vocal music. Through a hierarchical system, modeling pitch contours first followed by spectrograms, GaMaDHaNi captures the microtonal nuances that characterize this tradition. I will further discuss the challenges of conditioning such models on musically relevant parameters such as raga. Second, I will share insights from “cat-in-loop”, a collaborative performance created with the Cat in Black ensemble and my collaborators Weilu Ge and Hugo Garcia. This work explores the creative (mis)use of VampNet, a masked audio transformer model, as a tool for embodied improvisation and human-AI co-performance. Together, these projects reflect a broader inquiry into how generative systems can engage with musical practices - not merely as data, but as living, evolving traditions of sound, gesture, and interaction.
Bio: Nithya Shikarpur is a second-year PhD student at MIT advised by Prof. Cheng Zhi Anna Huang. She is interested in the modeling of human-AI interactive systems for music creation and creativity especially for low-resource genres of music. Earlier she was at Université de Montréal and Mila for her M.Sc. where she worked with Prof. Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang. She is also a practitioner and performer of Hindustani classical vocal music and draws on this knowledge to further her research projects.