There have been many attempts to express music in words. But what happens when you give a sequence of individual letters a sound with the help of artificial intelligence in order to compose music?
With the AI-based music composition system Ricercar, Ars Electronica Futurelab has explored this question. Together with Ricercar, artist and AI researcher Ali Nikrang interpreted the initials A.E.F. (Ars Electronica Futurelab) and A.E.C. (Ars Electronica Center) as musical notes and composed a musical theme on this basis. The final composition Sounding Letters was thus created in close collaboration between man and machine. The artist’s harmonic performance with a self-playing Bösendorfer CEUS piano expresses this creative alliance musically.
Following a comprehensive technical upgrade, you can now experience the captivating performance in Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center – virtually and in 3D. Visuals calculated in real time by Florian Berger react to the sounds of the human-AI composition and merge with the stereoscopic video by Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe in Deep Space 8K to create a unique experience.