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Musico for Cercle Music @ADE Festival Amsterdam, October 18-22, 2023

Lorenzo Brusci
14/10/2023

content: Generative Music Live Installation by MUSICO

installation for CERCLE @ADE Festival 2023

Musico’s generative engine is Inspired by the music of composer and producer Parra For Cuva

The Machine is a Cultural Tool, or better, the human body is the first machine, thus…

Who is the ghost in the machine?

The installation: a ghost piano situated at the lobby of an ultra-fine #WHotels In Amsterdam, is welcoming the guests of an amazing electronic music festival, playing as though possessed by an #Intertemporal Human Spirit.

This ethereal, yet technological marvel is an embodiment of an highly stratified algorithmic genius. Set on a minimalist stage, the piano itself is a sight to immerge in, sleek, futuristic, and generous in its potential aura: the Lp, the Cd, are silent, before the Djs play them for their audiences. The mechanisms is there, a silent instrument, till the music spirit makes it alive.

The keys dance under invisible fingers, but the virtuosity is very real, a blend of human ingenuity and machine efficiency – the ancient alliance, still here to surprise us and take us who knows where.

Embedded within the piano are actuators and sensors orchestrated by a microcontroller, moving the keys as if a phantom virtuoso is at the helm. The music is not mere reproduction—it is generative creativity fueled by Ai algorithms and human-machine interaction strategies, designed by MUSICO’s machine learning team.

The machine learning model has consumed a limited and specialised human-composed dataset of music inspired by composer Parra for Cuva, the EDM star selected by CERCLE MUSIC as the inspirer of this specific Musico’s Generative Ai process; Musico’s Ai has been assimilating elements of classical, jazz, and experimental genres, all wrapped up inside the compositional features distribution underpinnings the “Inspiring Original Playlist”: capturing not just the probable sequences of notes but the logical contexts that give to the original music strength and meaning. It discerns patterns, styles, and hidden rules that often play distracted roles in our operative music minds. What an alliance are we finally hosting!

In real-time, the AI sifts through this epistemic framework of musical human knowledge. As festival-goers pause, captivated by the surreal experience, the machine learning algorithm generates limitsless MIDI compositions. The compositions are then translated into mechanical impulses that drive the piano keys, creating a live, ever-changing musical experience. More instruments are mixed in the piano performance, diffused by a dedicated sound system, making the natural polyphonic interplay the perfect context to sublimate the piano articulation; plus, no matter the uneasiness of the never ending generation, and despite the lack of objective human time for listening to this irrational amount of music, the experience seems provoking us to imagine an intensive life-like-music ahead of us, maybe aiming at sonifying alien worlds and unlimited space-journeys, physical of virtual they might be, or redefining our idea of silence (…).

What emerges is a unique musical syntax—a sonic mosaic, intertwining algorithmic precision and human expressiveness.

To a certain extent, It captures the zeitgeist of the festival, encapsulating the collective musical preferences and cultural nuances dictated by the event and its attendees. It defies the distinction between creator and instrument, between human and machine. Each note played resonates as a question about the nature of creativity, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the ever-blurring boundaries between man and machine, as all actors of the EDM world know very well, assisted on a daily basis by our digital audio workstations and all sort of digital production tools .

A short sample of the generative music Musico will broadcast live at ADE

In this coalescence of technology and art, the ghost piano serves as both a spectacle and a scientific inquiry. It probes the edges of what we consider possible in the realm of musical composition and performance, stretching our understanding of both. And as the last note lingers in the air, dissipating into the festival’s ambient virtous noise, one can’t help but wonder: Have we just witnessed a new form of artistic expression, or a scientific experiment that challenges our foundational beliefs about creativity and consciousness? For sure, the future of music interpretation goes more probably through thinking emotions and past music references, setting your actual life determine what the music destiny will be: the old-new a bridge between humans and all sort of creatures alike.

In this scenario, there’s only space for beauty and diversity, space for anyone’s creativity, in a symbolic world where no one is left behind.

“it’s natural to be artificial”