Join The Wire magazine for the first in a series of three events exploring the uses and consequences of generative AI systems on music and composition.

Generative AI that uses Large Language Models works by using associations between words and data that are connected without context — mapped in a realm of computational modelling referred to as “latent space”. But what meanings can be drawn from these virtual geographies, what new territory uncovered?

Musician, researcher, artist and designer Damien Roach, who works under the name patten, produced the first AI text to sound album in 2021/22 with the open source program Diffusion – a process he describes as “crate digging in latent space”. He is working on a research/PhD project at the Royal College of Art titled “Acid Realism” after the work of the late critic Mark Fisher, addressing “AI imaging/perception/futures”.

patten will discuss and demonstrate his work and continuing developments that have been made in generative text to sound audio.

Sam Salem is an artist, composer and researcher at PRISM (Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester). He is concerned with the intersections of data maps, field recordings and psychogeography with neural networks, as ways of mapping latent space. In his 2022 composition Bury Me Deep, with trombonist Weston Olencki, Salem trained a neural net on thousands of field recordings of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Salem's work is concerned with hypnagogic, surrealist, and occult implications of lacunae in the datasets used to power generative AI, and how they make connections. As he writes, “For me, contextual information is absolutely vital: for a psychogeographer, a walk is never just a walk. In contrast, the algorithm requires no context for the data it is learning from. It will infer features for itself and construct its own representation of the information contained within the corpus.”

Sam will give a talk and presentation of their work.

The event will conclude with a panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Emily Bick, editor of The Wire.

Coming next:

TUESDAY 13 MAY, 7:30PM
THE WIRE SALON:
AI IS… ALL IN THE MIND OF JENNIFER WALSHE
With Jennifer Walshe, Cyborg Soloists and more TBC

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