Understanding Contemporary AI through Creative Practice
In the Intelligent Instruments Lab we create systems with AI that can be seen as musical co-creators. Focusing on physical instruments that exhibit agency and adaptation, we study how performers and audiences react to this new behaviour. We are interested in the experience of working with AI, how it feels and how it impacts our musical behaviour. For this reason we have designed a collection of instruments which we use in our work, involving people in workshops, design sessions, user studies, and performances. The instruments we brought to the Ars Electronica exhibition are the halldorophone and stacco.
Intelligent Instruments in Citizen Science, The Organium, photo: Esther Yr Thorvaldsdottir
Intelligent Instruments in Citizen Science, Halldorophone, photo: Esther Yr Thorvaldsdottir
The halldorophone has an embedded microcomputer that processes the signal chain of the instrument and affects its behaviour, giving the instrument a peculiar kind of agency. The halldorophone will be a “self-playing” instrument put up on a stand for visitors to experience. Those who are curious can try out or experience the instrument in performance for the first fifteen minutes at the beginning of every hour.
Stacco is a magnetic instrument that controls neural audio synthesis, where the multidimensional latent space of a trained audio model is navigated through a playful interaction with magnets.
Credits
The Intelligent Instruments project is developed by Thor Magnusson (IS), Jack Armitage (UK), Halla Steinunn Stefansdottir (IS), Victor Shepardson (USA), Nicola Privato (IT), Miguel Angel Rozzoli (AR), Halldor Ulfarsson (IS), Sean O’Brien (USA), Marco Donnarumma (IT), Sophie Skach (AT), Giacomo Lepri (IT).
The Intelligent Instruments project is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 101001848). The project is hosted at the University of Iceland. Some workshops and public engagements have been funded by the Icelandic Music Fund.
Presented in the context of the IMPETUS project. IMPETUS is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101058677 – HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01.
