Part of Trafó’s transdisciplinary focus Artificial Realities / Daily programme / Full focus programme

How does AI shape the musical environment that surrounds us? When will AI become a composer, and what will it never be able to do? 

Live acts created and performed by:
November 7, 9 p.m.: magzatfajzat; Peter Adam; voiwode; Bölöni Anna és Novák Ábris; Tóth Barnabás
November 9, 6 p.m.: Zenema Teq; cv general; Martin Forian

Listening sessions (7-9 November, ongoing) created by:
Aranyat Ingyen; output; mxrpha; Kovács Balázs; Dobri Dániel; Bardócz Botond

Brought together by Bálint Bolcsó, the listening sessions and live acts consist of works by current and former students and teachers of electronic music courses at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pécs and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. The choice of which of the countless AI-based techniques to use, and how to use them, varies greatly, and the program is equally diverse in terms of styles and genres.
The listening session can be attended on an ongoing basis, the created music will be playing in a loop. During the focus weekend, composers will also engage with AI live in the form of live acts – as creative partner, adversary, and source of inspiration.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly evolved from a technological novelty into an omnipresent tool that seems to be indispensable in whatever we do. While it can be helpful in completing a tedious task or solving a programming problem, what is the role of machine learning in artistic creation, an extremely human activity, through which we explore imaginaries and experience joy?
AI makes it possible for anyone to generate music similar to many other pieces of music with just a few clicks and no special expertise. For musicians, however, expanding on existing compositional toolkits is much more interesting and inspires new possibilities. We can train machine models on large data to improvise with us. We can transfer complex musical processes from one sound environment to another. We can control generative sound synthesis with information extracted from live performances. We can navigate the world of timbres with unprecedented ease. But while we entrust increasingly complex subtasks to algorithms, control always remains in the hands of the creator.” (Bálint Bolcsó)