Where: Intelligent Instruments Lab (google maps) Room Nr: VHV-104 When: Friday, November 22, 3-5 pm

Steve Symons - Entangled Instruments

One of Steve Symon's entangled instruments

In this open lab, Steve will be talking about his research into collaborative digital musical instruments. The series, called Entangled Instruments, is intended to promote social as much as musical interaction. Steve will reflect on his design journey from thinking about bodies and objects moving in space to engagement emerging from intersecting forces, and will invite people to try out his instruments. Steve will also introduce his new project, that is forming the basis of his visit to the Intelligent Instruments Lab.

Steve Symons

https://muio.org/

Steve is a digital instrument maker, artist and performer of over 20 years experience. He is known for an innovative series of Locative Sound Art works titled “Aura” and as member of the award winning three-person collective Owl Project. Owl Project have performed their unique blend of homemade electronics and traditional crafts (such as woodwork, weaving and flint knapping) widely such as at MusikProtokol (Graz), past NIME and ICLI conferences. Steve has extended this investigation of the sonification of real-time processes into his personal practice; creating and playing digital musical instruments based on a-life and neuronal simulations. A life-long interest in electronics has naturally drawn him to modular analogue synthesis, where uSEQ allows him to combine this with his, equally, long-term interest in coding. Steve is currently a Postgraduate Researcher at the Experimental Music Technologies (Emute) Lab at Sussex University.

Nicola Privato - Text-to-audio AI in musical performance.

Nicola Performing with his new pipeline at the SWRL Festival in Riga

Nicola will talk about his newly developed pipeline for live performance, that combines asynchronous audio generation from textual prompts and real time neural audio synthesis with his musical interfaces (Thales and Stacco - the latter, developed together with Giacomo Lepri). Nicola has experimented with this system in a recent performance at SWRL festival, in Riga, Latvia, using Fluxus scores as prompts. He will discuss the experience of playing with AI’s unpredictability in an extemporary setting to spice up the performance, and how text scores change in form and meaning as they are used to prompt a generative system instead of human performers.

Nicola Privato

https://nicolaprivato.com

Nicola is an Italian composer, performer and researcher based in Reykjavik. As an IIL memember and PhD researcher, Nicola has spent the last three years developing intelligent musical instruments and performing with them, in order to understand how AI is entering our social interstices and influencing our thinking about the world and ourselves.