A Duet with AI: "Singularity Mirror" for Violin & GenAI ("Genflections" Movement 1)

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 first movement ("Singularity Mirror") represents the hypothetical experience of gazing into a reflection surface and seeing your AI counterpart (having reached singularity) looking back and mimicking your every move. The composition of this movement used a form of human-driven reinforcement learning: the human composer started with the initial fragment, prompted it to the AI which generated 3 possibilities as a next segment. The human selected the "best" option and then composed a subsequent fragment based on it; this process is repeated throughout the duration of the movement. The composer's writing style in this movement is heavily influenced by Bela Bartok, particularly the use of non-traditional scale patterns such as whole-tone and octatonic.

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
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