Porto Electronic Music Symposium.

Thor Magnusson has been invited to give a keynote and a workshop at the Porto Electronic Music Symposium.

Intelligent instruments are a result of how contemporary AI technologies are becoming integral components of our musical ecosystems. The application of creative AI can range from automatic music creation to the embedding of intelligent algorithms in the instrument itself. Based on experience in practice-based research on creative AI systems, I will present a new mode of exploration and enquiry that emerges when we encounter an intelligent instrument and begin to discover their ergodynamics. The HCI notion of interactivity moves aside for autonomy and a stronger perception of agentical relations through dialogue, probing, curiosity, surprise, alterity and collaboration. When our musical instrument becomes an interlocutor with a strong agency our interaction shifts more to that of prediction, expectation, and confirmation, resulting in a heightened improvisational approaches.

In this workshop we will look at working with the SuperCollider audio programming environment and how this can be implemented in the Bela audio microcomputer for embedded instruments. We will make SuperCollider Synth Definitions and upload them to Belas. As a practical example we will be composing SuperCollider pieces and uploading them to the Bela in the halldorophone.