Stacco is a musical instrument combining the playful properties of magnets and AI. Stacco incorporates models of different sound sources, such as flowing liquids, human voices, percussions, or old organs. These can be mixed with sliders and intuitively explored by manipulating magnetic spheres on the instrument’s surface. As the performer moves the spheres, Stacco’s magnetic forces influence their trajectories, allowing both nuanced musical control and the emergence of unpredictable sonic behaviours.

Stacco opens up new ways of integrating AI in the musical experience, leveraging the liveness of magnetic interactions and embodied intuition. The instrument features a novel AI technology known as Neural Audio Synthesis. Here, machine learning models are trained on small datasets of sounds coming from different sources, which the algorithm learns to reconstruct in real time according to the user’s behaviour.

Stacco comes with removable graphic scores that function as guides for the exploration of the latent spaces in the AI model. These scores can be positioned between Stacco’s board and the magnetic marbles, allowing one to draw and compose with musical gestures.

Further information at https://nicolaprivato.com/stacco and https://www.giacomolepri.com/stacco.

Our research with Stacco

• Stacco:Exploring the Embodied Perception of Latent Representations in Neural Synthesis. Nicola Privato & Victor Shepardson & Giacomo Lepri & Thor Magnusson. Proc. New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2024 (NIME 2024), Utrecht, Netherlands. [pdf]

• Sketching Magnetic Interactions for Neural Synthesis. Nicola Privato, Giacomo Lepri, Thor Magnusson & Einar Torfi Einarsson. TENOR 2024, Zurich, Switzerland. [pdf]