Where: Intelligent Instruments Lab (google maps) Stapi, Room Nr 107 When: Friday, November 29, 3-5 pm

Robert Laidlow - Techno-Utopia and Stacco

Composer Robert Laidlow

TECHNO-UTOPIA is a concerto for live-processed piano and orchestra exploring the structural role of algorithms in the 21st century human experience, and features the soloist performing with several types of machine learning. This exploratory project with Nicola and Victor at the IIL has involved training new RAVE models on orchestral music, specifically the radio broadcast archive of the BBC Philharmonic, and controlling these models with the Stacco. We have experimented with different types of recordings and different methods of activating strange and exciting sounds within the latent space. The soloist will perform on this instrument during the concerto, acting as a spectre of the physical orchestra, and I also hope to use our work in other contexts, including transcribing the impossible orhcestral sounds the Stacco produces to be reinterpreted by an all-acoustic ensemble.

Robert Laidlow

https://www.robertlaidlow.co.uk

Robert Laidlow is a composer and researcher based in the UK. Robert’s music has been commissioned and performed across the globe and broadcast on television and radio. 2024-25 projects include TECHNO-UTOPIA, a concerto for piano and intelligent instrument soloist and orchestra, Tui for International Contemporary Ensemble, Content for saxophonist David Zucchi and music for video game controllers. 2022-23 saw the premiere of Silicon for symphony orchestra and artificial intelligence, a 40-minute work written for the BBC Philharmonic, and Post-Singularity Songs for Stephanie Lamprea. Robert holds a Career Development Fellowship in Composition at Jesus College, Oxford University. From 2018-2022 he was the PRiSM Researcher in Artificial Intelligence in association with the BBC Philharmonic - a relationship that resulted in several new works exploring intelligent technology.

Florence cats - the Prepared Theremin

Musician Florence Cats

Florence Cats will discuss her practice with the prepared theremin. She will introduce us to the history and evolution of this instrument, and discuss how it is being used by artists nowadays. We will then attempt some live experiments by mapping the theremin to our AI instruments!

Florence Cats

https://www.florence-cats.com/

Florence Cats is an artist and acupunctor based in Brussels. She plays the theremin by interfering with tiny objects, water, radio and voice. Her releases which also include piano and field recording, oscillate between drone ambient, lo-fi electroacoustics and experimental music.

Her transversal work has been presented at KET/tv control center (Athens), Radiophrenia (Glasgow), CWB (Paris), L’Academia Belgica (Rome), KBCB (Biel), PAS (Berlin), Occii (Amsterdam), the Minard Theatre (Ghent), Stuk (Leuven), Q-O2 (Brussels), ETE78 (Brussels).