Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ars Electronica Center celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2021. As part of the celebrations, Sounding Letters was created: it utilizes the initial letters of the two institutions as a musical theme, which was used to compose a piece of music with the help of the AI system Ricercar.
Sounding Letters is one of the winning projects of the internal ideas competition Futurelab Ideas Expedition 2021. The work is based on the following idea: Notes in music can be represented as letters. Eight letters A to G are used for this purpose. A C-major scale, for example, is represented as C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Each letter corresponds to a note that can occur in different octaves. In the case of the Ars Electronica Futurelab the musical theme consists of A-E-F and in the case of the Ars Electronica Center the theme is: A-E-C.
Sounding Letters photo: Robert Bauernhansl
Sounding Letters
Sounding Letters photo: Denise Hirtenfelder
Ricercar Image: Ali Nikrang
From a musical point of view, an interesting aspect of these themes is that all the notes belong to the same or similar chords (e.g A-min, F-maj, F-maj7 or A-min6) and thus all the letters harmonize in any combination. In the history of music, several examples can be found in which composers use this notation to represent words, names, initial letters or even messages in their music and to “encrypt” a message in their music. Apparently, the representation is limited to only eight letters (or nine in the German system) and cannot be used in many cases.
Sounding Letters was implemented using Ricercar, an AI-based music composition system developed by Key Researcher Ali Nikrang at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. Ricercar was used to compose several pieces of music based on the musical themes. We selected one of the pieces as a musical baseline that was performed at the Ars Electronica Festival 2021 together with human musicians.
Demo: Sounding Letters — Visualized AI/Human composed piano performance
Not only was the composition created in close collaboration between human and machine, the result was also performed by Ali Nikrang in a joint performance with a self-playing Steinway & Sons Spirio piano.
More information about Sounding Letters and the Ars Electronica Futurelab Ideas Expedition can be found on the Ars Electronica Blog.
Credits
Ali Nikrang
Sounding Letters is one of the winning projects of the Ars Electronica Futurelab Ideas Expedition 2021