AI & Music

  • Walzersymphonie

    Walzersymphonie

    Johann Strauss II and Creative AI

    The year 2025 marks the 200th birthday of world-famous composer Johann Strauss II. On behalf of Johann Strauss Festjahr 2025 Wien, the Ars Electronica Futurelab is dedicating itself to this anniversary with “Walzersymphonie” (Waltz Symphony). The project’s central question is: “How can artists use the creative potential of AI technologies?”

  • Absolute Hallucination

    Absolute Hallucination

    An AI Self-Playing Piano Improvisation

    Absolute Hallucination: An AI Self-Playing Piano Improvisation by Futurelab Key Researcher Ali Nikrang explores the creative space learned by an AI-based music composition system by randomly traveling through different compositional paths. It provokes questions about the nature of music and the hallucinatory characteristics of generative AI. The world premiere of this piece took place at…

  • transart23: Pianographique

    transart23: Pianographique

    Music and Images by Humans and Machines

    “Pianographique – Music and Images by Humans and Machines” at transart23 in Bolzano combined two current artistic research projects of Ars Electronica, both dedicated to the creative fusion of instrumental music and digital technologies.

  • Sounding Letters

    Sounding Letters

    When AI Turns Letters Into Music

    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.

  • Ricercar

    Ricercar

    Interactive AI-Based Composition System

    What does it mean to compose together with a machine? What forms of musical authorship emerge when generative systems no longer function merely as tools but actively engage in artistic processes? Ricercar is a research software that operates precisely at this intersection between human artistic intuition and machine autonomy – not to resolve this tension,…

  • AI x Music

    AI x Music

    Exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center

    The potential of artificial intelligence in musical applications has been demonstrated by various projects in recent years. Modern AI can certainly be seen as another step towards expanding musical possibilities through the use of technology.

  • Mahler-Unfinished

    Mahler-Unfinished

    Music made by man and machine: For the Big Concert Night at the 2019 Ars Electronica Festival, Ali Nikrang, Key Researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab, added to Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony – together with an artificially intelligent algorithm.