S+T+ARTS workshop
Exploring connections between AI and Music
Online
A panel of groundbreaking artists and leading experts in Artificial Intelligence will come together for the workshop ‘Exploring connections between AI and Music’. The live-streamed event is free to watch, and marks the presentation of the AI and Music Festival and its first activity.
The AI and Music Festival, taking place at Barcelona’s CCCB on the 27th and 28th October 2021 is an initiative of the S+T+ARTS program of the European Commission, and is organized by Sónar, UPC-Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya and betevé.
The workshop is the first in a series of activities created by the festival’s ThinkingLab. The ThinkingLab, which will be in operation from May until the dates of the Festival, is a space for debate, co-creation and experimentation bringing together international experts in Artificial Intelligence (musicians, technologists, cultural historians, scientists, programmers etc) with the goal of identifying and conceptualizing the main challenges and latest innovations in the application of AI to musical creation. The conclusions and lines of work that emerge from this laboratory will feed into the content of the festival in October, and will form the basis of future activities.
‘Exploring connections between AI and Music’ fosters, from a humanist, scientific and creative perspective, an open dialogue between experts and the audience (both in-person and remotely connected), who will be able to contribute to the discussion.
Joining the discussion will be 3 artists who have made AI an integral part of their recent work:
- Claire L. Evans of the USA based band YACHT, whose 2019 LPChain Trippingused machine learning as part of the composition process.
- Jan St. Werner, one half of the German duo Mouse on Mars, whose recentAAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence)project, moves machine intelligence onto a central, practical and philosophical plane.
- Ivan Paz, a central figure in the live-coding scene, whose work foregrounds the use of Machine Learning in from-scratch composition.
These artists will be joined by 3 leading specialists selected by UPC whose combined expertise covers neural network training and speech synthesis, climate conscious applications of AI and algorithmic composition.
- Michaela Milano, professor of Artificial Intelligence at University of Bologna. Her research activity has a particular focus on decision support and optimisation systems.
- Jordi Pons, researcher at Dolby Laboratories. He received a PhD in music technology, large-scale audio collections, and deep learning at the Music Technology Group (Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona).
- Javier Ruiz has a degree in Telecommunications Engineering at The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He received a PhD in image processing and his research focuses on Computer Vision.
The workshop in English, and will set the stage for a season of talks, debates and knowledge exchanges.
