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This is Sónar+D

Sónar+D – Sónar Festival's creative technologies conference – is an international congress exploring how creative minds are changing our present and imagining new futures, in collaboration with researchers, innovators and business leaders from all sectors and industries.

AI x Music Festival: Bot Bop Musical creation and innovation with AI

Andrew Claes (BE) and Dago Sondervan (NL)

Musical phrases are fed in real-time to a live coded machine learning model. The emerging virtual agent reacts and is again reacted to, creating an organic feedback loop. Utilising improvisational, instant composing and algorithmic musical techniques, listen to the duo becoming a trio during the course of this performance.

Genetic Biotech through the Eyes of Artists

BOZAR presents a talk on genetic modification, featuring Sandra Lorenzi (FR), Kuang-Yi Ku (TW), Christophe De Jaeger (BE), and 2 scientists from the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie – VIB. The talk will be preceded by a video streaming of a guided tour in the VIB facilities in Gent (BE), with Sandra Lorenzi (FR – artist of the Studiotopia programme), Kuang-Yi Ku (TW – artist of the Studiotopia programme), Sofie Bekaert (BE – VIB) and VIB scientists Roosmarijn Vandenbroucke and Sofie Goormachtig, presenting their current research.

Acte de Fe

Marc Vilajuana, Adrià Grandia, Carlos Martorell

Act of faith (Acte de Fe) is an exploration of our relationship with technology, its similarities with the one we have with religion, the tools involved in both processes, and its impact on us and in our sacred/private space. Mise-en-scène will consist in a liturgy performed by Marc Vilajuana (voice, effects, hand drum), Adrià Grandia (acoustic and MIDI hurdy-gurdy, modular synth, laptop, aerophones), Carlos Martorell (coding, synths, motion sensors, artiphon) and a real-time reactive AI trained with religious scores.

Interdependence with Richie Hawtin: AI for humans

Holly Herndon, Matt Dryhust

In this discussion we explode the false binary of humans and machines in the music making process, explore ways that AI systems could actually help get more humans paid rather than displace them, and discuss the necessity of artists having a seat at the table in the process of AI tool development.

Dance the distance

Ariella Vidach (IT), Claudio Prati (CH), Paolo Solcia (CH), Riccardo Santalucia (IT), Sebastiano Barbieri (IT), Francesco Luzzana (IT), Giovanni Landi (IT)

Live Guided Tour in a Dance Virtual Studio. MEET’s second project Dance the distance is a live guided tour through a virtual dance studio. Participants as avatars will be able to meet the virtual dancers and join an open rehearsal for a VR dance performance in progress.

Meet the Media Guru

William Myers (US/NL)

Within its Meet the Media Guru format, MEET presents a talk by William Myers about the emerging practice of integrating biological processes into art and digital creativity. An exhibition curator and lecturer based in Amsterdam (NL), Myers is the author of two widely acclaimed books about the intersections of design, art, and science: Biodesign and BioArt.

CNMAT ODOT

John MacCallum(USA), Jeff Lubow (USA) 

In this workshop, we will provide a brief, practical introduction to odot, a dynamic, multi-paradigm programming environment that operates on Open Sound Control. Developed at CNMAT beginning in 2007, odot has evolved into a powerful and robust suite of tools useful in a variety of contexts, from gesture signal processing to computer-aided composition. During this workshop, we will discuss the current state of the package and the future of the project.

The QuBits VR Space

Jon Kulpa

Jon Kulpa is available to host a live online demonstration/performance of QuBits VR. The QuBits project is a virtual reality (VR) environment built by the composer that offers an expanded medium for musical experience with integrated space and visuals.  The environment was designed to explore a musical aesthetic valuing sound mass, spatial sound, evolving sound, and algorithmically generated sonic structures.  The user of the VR system plays a key role in shaping these musical elements.  The user first discovers what behaviors are possible through exploration and chance encounters.  They can then shape each discovered behavior with nuance if they choose.  The system provides a unique experience each time it is run.  The sounds are a mix of real world sampled sound, granular synthesis, and real-time generated synthetic sound.

Performance of CORAIL

Edmund Campion

There is no pre-defined score for CORAIL (CORAL). CORAIL is a software environment that performs audio analysis of an incoming live signal that generates and organizes sound through the computer and the CORAIL algorithms. Persistence inside any one environment causes the program to move toward greater sound generation and machine autonomy.

ORCHIDEA with Composer and Lead Researcher at CNMAT

Carmine Cella

Carmine Cella is available to host a live online demonstration/workshop for ORCHIDEA, a framework for static and dynamic computer-assisted music orchestration. Orchestration consists largely of choosing combinations of sounds, instruments, and timbres that support the narrative of a piece of music. The ORCHIDEA project assists composers during the orchestration process by automatically searching for the best combinations of orchestral sounds to match a target sound, after embedding it in a high-dimensional feature space.

ALICE, ALICES UNCHAINED, and THE FLOWER MATRIX

Edmund Campion and Claudia Hart

ALICE, ALICES UNCHAINED, and THE FLOWER MATRIX is a long-term collaborative project between media artist Claudia Hart and composer Edmund Campion (CNMAT). Since 2013, they have collaborated on the ALICES project, a series of artworks, loosely connected to Alice in Wonderland, and appearing through the years as a series of pieces that migrate from performance-based multi-media theatre, video, gallery installations, to virtual reality environments. This film documents the history of the on-going project with excerpts from several of the works along with interviews with the artists and collaborators.

Live Performances in occasion of the AIxMusic Opening ceremony

Edmund Campion, CORAIL with Steve Adams of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and Andrew Blanton, WAVEGUIDE, Claudia Hart, Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion, CORAIL with Steve Adams of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and Andrew Blanton, WAVEGUIDE, Claudia Hart, Edmund Campion WAVEGUIDE - 2017 - percussion, distributed audio and electronics: Music composition and performance by Andrew Blanton  Text by Yvette Granata  Composition and software by Andrew Blanton  Special thanks to Neal Riley for technical support.  CORAIL - version 2020 - improvising saxophonist and interactive computer system: Composition and computer environment design by Edmund Campion, Director, CNMAT  Tenor Saxophone by Steve Adams  Software contributions by Manuel Poletti, Matthew Wright, Edmund Campion (and a host of others)  This concert is being streamed live from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and made possible by CNMAT Researcher and Technical Director, Jeremy Wagner

On a Journey with Alma

Giulia Tomasello (IT)

Alma is a wearable biosensor designed to monitor vaginal fluids. We strive to support and educate women about their intimate health through technology. Giulia Tomasello, designer and co-founder of Alma, will guide you through the research and prototype development at the Fraunhofer IZM TexLab in Berlin.

Fermenting Futures

Prof. Diethard Mattanovich (AT), Prof. Ingeborg Reichle (DE), Anna Dumitriu (UK), Alex May (UK), Sonja Schachinger (AT)

The project will introduce some of the thousands of yeast species and their characteristics, as well as synthetic biology methods to create new yeast strains with exceptional capabilities to make our lives better while preserving the planet.

Eebo Video Tutorial

eebo (AT)

Eebo is a video platform in Uganda which aims to help creators market their content to viewers who pay for access to their work directly. For users to access said content without internet cost, its strategy is to open up as many public WiFi hotspots as possible.

Communication with the Invisible

Pei-Ying Lin (TW)

Uncertainty is everywhere. It is what we experience when facing the unknown, but also when trying to communicate or negotiate with the invisible. It also shows up during the artist’s process of a creating a project. Pei-Ying Lin’s journey explores this aspect by exposing the process of creation of her project “Proposal of Collaboration with the Viral Entities.”

Between

BeAnotherLab (INT)

As a collective practice, Beanotherlab exists in the spaces between disciplines, communities, geographies, and methodologies. Distributed, but interdependent. This tour presents a meditation on the uncertainties and sensitivities inherent in transdisciplinary collaboration.

Prosthetic Memory

M Eifler (US)

When I tell you I have memory loss, you'll likely say "I forget things all the time! A name, my keys, where I parked, constantly." But do you remember being a sticky wild-eyed kid? Or maybe you have a story from your early 20s you love to tell, laced with seedy details. I have none of that.

Adriatic Garden

Robertina Šebjanič (SI), Gjino Sutic (HR)

Adriatic Garden will take viewers on a journey of the Adriatic Sea.