"Channel Surfing" for Violin & Generative AI (GenAI)

In a world where emergent Generative AI is starting to impact many areas of our lives and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is potentially right around the corner, "Genflections" is a thought(-provoking) project exploring the roles and relationship between humans & AI in the classical music composition / performance process.

The work is scored for acoustic violin and GenAI, the latter using Meta's open-source MusicGen and AudioGen models within the AudioCraft framework. The general composition process involved creating short (30 seconds or less) AI clips using text-based prompts and/or grounded on other clips of music (created either by the human composer or AI). The human notated identifiable scales & melodies and composed countermelodies and/or rulesets for improvisation. The resulting set of final cuts were processed and arranged by the human into three cohesive and thematic movements; these have been pre-recorded for playback during a live performance while a human violinist plays along. The other project artifacts were also a collaboration between human and AI: images (incorporated into the video recording or played back via slideshow during a live performance) were created via Bing Copilot/OpenAI's DALL-E and titles & program notes are of human origin.

The second movement ("Channel Surfing") starts with a clip wholly generated by AI through a text prompt. While the initial prompt had called for "an electric viola lick with minor distortion", the resulting output contained a lot more noise than originally anticipated. This unintended consequence sparked the imagery of someone trying to tune a bad, out-of-band radio, which subsequently became the inspiration of the rest of the movement; thus, all clips are based off of that original track. Despite the wildly divergent styles (some of which draw upon a number of folk styles from around the world) between the individual clips, a unified tonality ties them together through a blues-like nonatonic scale: Eb, F#, G, Ab, Bb, B, C, C#, D. The exception is a "hallucination" in the middle of the movement that serves as an interlude and provides a striking contrast to the rest of the movement's intensity. The human performer takes a backseat in this movement by providing only improvised accompaniment based on a set of pre-written instructions/guidelines. This movement's audio track is coincidentally 4'33" long, which begs the question: "from a human audience's perspective, is that time better spent experiencing how humans or AI fill the space of silence?"

Human Composer: Timothy O'Neill
AI Composer: Meta (Audiocraft/MusicGen/AudioGen)
Violinist: Timothy O'Neill
Prompt Engineer: Timothy O'Neill
AI Graphic Artist: Microsoft/OpenAI (MS Copilot/DALL-E)
Audio Production: Timothy O'Neill
Video Production: Timothy O'Neill
Quality Assurance: Monique Garza O'Neill
Recorded on 11/25/2023 in Sarasota, FL
Live World Premiere on 4/19/2024 in Cincinnati, OH (simultaneously released on YouTube)

#genai #aimusic #violin #newmusic #electroacoustic #electronicmusic #audiovisual
****************************************************
Please subscribe to my channel, new videos uploaded every other week:    / @neoplaysviolin