Here are some links on a whole bunch of topics
Most of this stuff has already been done or is well on its way.
We could attempt to contribute original research in one of these areas.
We could work on a project that has already been done but make it open source.
We could think up our own area, like Hack an IPOD and nike +.
ROBOTICALLY CONTROLLED INSTRUMENTS
Toyota trumpet playing robot
Ragtime automated music (ragtimewest.com)
Lemurbots.org
Christine Southworth bot(i)cello (
http://www.kotekan.com/)
REAL TIME CONTROL
cmu midi toolkit
PHYSICAL MODELING SYNTHESIS
ccrma
dennis nomer
SIGNAL PROCESSING, AND SPECTRAL SYNTHESIS
nyquist language
COMPUTER COMPOSITION
David Cope, EMI
M. Farbood and B. Schoner, Analysis and Synthesis of Palestrina-Style Counterpoint UsingMarkov Chains
OPTICAL MUSIC RECOGNITION
audiveris
photoscore.com
MUSIC SEARCH AND RETRIEVAL
musart
MUSIC PARSERS
Rens Bod
PEOPLE AND PLACES
David Cope Experiments in Musical Inteligence
Barry Vercoe @ mit media lab
CCRMA
IRCAM
CNMAT
University of Plymouth
http://www.iua.upf.es/mtg/Music Mind and Machine
Brad Garton @ Columbia and Princetons labs
Ichiro Fujinaga @ McGill
Timara
CRCA