Tuesday 13 May 2025, 7.30pm
In the second of three events hosted by The Wire magazine that look at the impact of AI on music making, composer Jennifer Walshe gives a talk and performance based on her new manifesto 13 Ways Of Looking At AI, Art And Music, plus talks and performances by Zubin Kanga and Robert Laidlow of Cyborg Soloists.
Composer Jennifer Walshe has long been working with AI systems to compose and improvise. Her research and experiences led her to write the essay 13 Ways Of Looking At AI, Art And Music (now published as a book by Unsound). Avoiding both overly optimistic tech-boosterism and predictions of doom, she considers AI as companion species, conceptual art, and even boobs.
For this Salon, Jennifer will be giving a talk based on 13 Ways and a performance of work from her album A Late Anthology Of Early Music Vol 1: Ancient To Renaissance (Tetbind, 2020), in which she worked with Dadabots to train a machine learning system on her voice and map the system's results onto key works of early music.
To begin the evening, Zubin Kanga and Robert Laidlow will discuss, demonstrate and perform new works that feature new creative uses of AI.
Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg Soloists research project has been creating new works that experiment with the use of AI (as well as biosensors, hybrid instruments and audio-visual innovations) for the past four years. He will discuss several key works that use generative audio-visual AI generation or autonomous AI co-performers, as well as performing Nwando Ebizie’s I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) featuring AI-generated text and voices alongside piano and synthesizer.
Composer Robert Laidlow will discuss his new concerto for Zubin Kanga, TECHNO-UTOPIA, to be premiered later this year with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. TECHNO-UTOPIA has been composed in collaboration with the orchestra, who provided their radio broadcast archives as the materials for several types of generative, analytical, and machine listening AI models. Zubin and the orchestra traverse these AI models live in performance, which include IRCAM’s RAVE and AI-based synthesizers, using a variety of instruments including a new AI-integrated instrument – the Stacco (created by Nicola Privato at the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Reykjavik) – which Zubin and Robert will demonstrate. The featured works all raise questions about the uses of AI as a creative tool, the ethics of its use and how artists use it, and what the future holds for these technologies.
The event will conclude with a discussion and Q&A moderated by Emily Bick, editor of The Wire.
https://milker.org/jenniferwalshebiography
https://www.cyborgsoloists.com
https://www.thewire.co.uk
Coming next:
TUESDAY 24 JUNE, 7:30PM
THE WIRE SALON:
MAKING & BREAKING THE RULES: ON OPERATING & OTHER SYSTEMS
With Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Matt Colqhoun (Xenogothic) and more TBC
Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, and technologist. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of creating, co-creating and performing interdisciplinary music that seeks to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies.
In 2020, Kanga was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multi-year project Cyborg Soloists, based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Senior Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts. Cyborg Soloists is unlocking new possibilities in composition and performance through interactions with AI and machine learning, interactive visuals, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments. His Cyborg Soloists work was recently featured in The New York Times, The Wire, Classical Music Magazine, and Limelight Magazine, and regularly featured on BBC Radio and the BBC World Service.
Zubin has premiered more than 160 works and performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Paris Autumn Festival (France), Time of Music (Finland), Music Current (Ireland), Klang Festival (Denmark), PODIUM Festival (Germany), Gaudeamus Festival (Netherlands), Transit Festival (Belgium) and Modulus Festival (Canada). He was a member of Ensemble Offspring for 15 years, and has performed as concerto soloist with Manchester Collective, Explore Ensemble, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Recent collaborations include Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using a KeyScanner to allow the piano to type text onto the screen like a typewriter; Alexander Schubert’s internet-based score WIKI-PIANO.NET (performed 30 times across 9 countries as well as the BBC World Service) as well as, Steady State, that uses EEG brain sensors to control music and holographic video; the keyboard/piano concerto, Schiller’s Piano by Laurence Osborn, performed with Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre in London, and a new concerto by Rob Laidlow which will be premiered with the BBC Philharmonic, featuring an AI system modelled on the orchestra’s archives, performed with AI-integrated digital instruments.
