Programs

This concert is an important milestone in Andrea Szigetvári's experiments in electronic music with artificial intelligence. The composer was a winner of the BME Art Residency Program 2023 in Artificial Intelligence, Music and Copyright under the mentorship of Dr. Anikó Grad-Gyenge and Dr. Bertalan Forstner. This event concludes the research conducted during the residency programme.

In the work, the main task of the artificial intelligence is to categorise and sort the corpus of thousands of collected or created sounds according to certain parameters of timbre.

Some of the tools created during the development of generating software using linguistic models that have reached the music industry have also been made available for artistic composition. In the present case, they are libraries that can be used to teach AI to characterise the timbres of a corpus of sounds in a composer's corpus, broken down into small segments, to represent their relationships, and to sort the collection according to instructions given by the composer.

The Corpus Experiments embodies an understanding of authorship that rejects the dichotomy of the authoritative, all-controlling individual author and the anonymous mass. It also protests against the music industry's practice of using artificial intelligence to exploit composers for profit in an exploitative way that erases them. During the playback of the work, it is possible to see what percentage of the contributors are listed as authors at any given moment. The playback of live musical sounds, noises or the pre-recorded sound file interacts with the corpus on the computer, which, based on an analysis of the sound material, arranges the small crumbs of the sound collection according to predefined association rules. In addition to the live saxophone playing, the sound of Katinka Hajas's sculptural installation will also be part of the music.

In response to external sound impulses, the computer generates them according to two types of logic. Either it follows a path within a corpus: it combines a line of music from the collection in response to an external stimulus. Or, it continuously analyses the timbre of the live soundtrack, compares it with a pre-analysed sound file of the database and, by selecting the most similar sound grain, virtually recreates the sound with the sound segments assigned to it from the database. In the resulting unrepeatable concert experience, the listener encounters at once Szigetvári's compositional intent, the sound material of the corpus contributors and the guided yet unpredictable contribution of artificial intelligence.

Recording and concert performances will feature saxophonists Erzsébet Seleljo and János Ávéd. Anxiety Mills, a kinetic installation by Katinka Hajas can be experienced and featured as an instrument during the performance.

In addition to Andrea Szigetvári, Ákos Lovász, Ágnes Klára Máthé, Péter Mári, Dávid Bodnár Vajda, Natalie Szende, Bálint Baráth, Miklós Lukács, Erzsébet Seleljo, János Ávéd, Péter Gőz, Írisz Stampf, István Tanka, László Sándor Papp, Yagiz Dündar, Mahshid Khaloo Bagheri, Matteo Marco Stossi and Osman Yozgyur contributed to the sound corpus.

Beyond the mentors, sound collectors and saxophonists, László Szerednik (development of an application for sound collection and sound categorisation) and Szabolcs Keresteš (sound engineering) participated in the preparation and presentation of the work.