In musical (jazz) improvisation, musicians that are just starting out can often feel uncomfortable when being put on the spot by their fellow players. However, when a musician is on their own when practising or leisurely playing, this prevents them from listening to fellow musicians. When a musician wants to experience some notion of co-play when they are on their own, computers and musical generative techniques may be a source of help. We study the extent to which music improvisation algorithms can facilitate such interactions by proposing an experimental framework to evaluate and compare these different algorithms. We achieve this by developing MILES ('Mixed-Initiative musicaL interactivE System'), a generic music improvisation system that allows a musician to improvise with various musical improvisation models and facilitates comparative evaluation of these models. MILES makes use of the 'trading fours' paradigm, where two or more musicians exchange four measures of solo material. We conduct experiments with novice and advanced musicians in expert-pupil and peer-to-peer settings that compare differing algorithms, as well as different variations of similar algorithms. These comparisons are based on self-assessed opinions and third-party grading and ordering of recordings, based on improvisational reciprocity and enjoyment. Symbolic music recording analysis further quantifies the interactivity between the musician and the algorithms. With this experimental setup, we are able to track familiarity and enjoyment of using music improvisation algorithms, and compare different iterations of similar music improvisation algorithms.

Chromostereoscopic images encode depth as colour, with the red part of the visible spectrum encoding nearby depths and the blue part encoding far-away depths. However, when encoding a regular image with its depth, the generated colours may not match with the original colours in the image. Following a user study, a technique has been developed which takes both the chromostereoscopic effect and the original colours into consideration.

This problem was solved by creating a program to generate chromostereoscopic images from an arbitrary RGBD input image. An optimisation metric was devised to assess if a chromostereoscopic image takes both the target depth and original image into consideration. A user study was conducted to correct this metric with respect to human perception. The new technique can take a desired amount of original colour and chromostereoscopic depth and will generate a chromostereoscopic image, taking these preferences into account.