An event hosted by The Wire magazine that looks at the impact of AI on music making. Composer Jennifer Walshe gives a talk and performance based on her new manifesto 13 Ways Of Looking At AI, Art And Music, plus talks and performances by Zubin Kanga and Robert Laidlow of Cyborg Soloists.
Jennifer will be giving a talk based on her essay 13 Ways Of Looking At AI, Art and Music and a performance of work from her album A Late Anthology Of Early Music Vol 1: Ancient To Renaissance (Tetbind, 2020), in which she worked with Dadabots to train a machine learning system on her voice and map the system's results onto key works of early music.
To begin the evening, Zubin Kanga and Robert Laidlow will discuss, demonstrate and perform new works that feature new creative uses of AI.
Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg Soloists research project has been creating new works that experiment with the use of AI (as well as biosensors, hybrid instruments and audio-visual innovations) for the past four years. He will discuss several key works that use generative audio-visual AI generation or autonomous AI co-performers, as well as performing Nwando Ebizie’s I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) featuring AI-generated text and voices alongside piano and synthesizer.
Composer Robert Laidlow will discuss his new concerto for Zubin Kanga, TECHNO-UTOPIA, to be premiered later this year with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. TECHNO-UTOPIA has been composed in collaboration with the orchestra, who provided their radio broadcast archives as the materials for several types of generative, analytical, and machine listening AI models. Zubin and the orchestra traverse these AI models live in performance, which include IRCAM’s RAVE and AI-based synthesizers, using a variety of instruments including a new AI-integrated instrument – the Stacco (created by Nicola Privato at the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Reykjavik) – which Zubin and Robert will demonstrate. The featured works all raise questions about the uses of AI as a creative tool, the ethics of its use and how artists use it, and what the future holds for these technologies.
The event will conclude with a discussion and Q&A moderated by Emily Bick, editor of The Wire.
Cover photo by Thor Brødreskift