A captivating virtual experience: the new program Sounding Letters at Deep Space 8K shows how humans and AI create music together with a 3D piano concert.
Often, people have tried to express music in words. But what happens when artificial intelligence is used to give a sequence of individual letters a sound in order to compose music together with them?
Ali Nikrang, an artist and researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab, explored this question with his AI-based music composition system Ricercar: Ricercar interpreted the initials A.E.F. (Ars Electronica Futurelab) and A.E.C. (Ars Electronica Center) as musical notes and composed a theme on that basis. The final composition Sounding Letters was 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 as well.
Sounding Letters photo: Robert Bauernhansl
Sounding Letters photo: Robert Bauernhansl
Sounding Letters photo: vog.photo
Following a comprehensive technical upgrade, you can now experience this unique 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.
Credits
Ars Electronica Futurelab: Florian Berger, Ali Nikrang, Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe