AI & Music powered by S+T+ARS at Sónar 2026
June 18+19. Llotja de Mar • Barcelona.
Exploring a post-AI musical landscape —
two days of performances, talks, workshops
and exhibitions at the heart of Barcelona.
© Keigo Yoshida
Cover image: ◊ IRCAM Forum © David Pons
© David Dalmazzo
© Google Deep Mind
Thursday 18
Opening – Performance
10:30–11:00
ImprovAI
Ignasi Terraza & Philippe Salembier
ImprovIA is what happens when one of the most relevant jazz pianists in Spain begins to improvise and an artificial intelligence system listens to him with the same attention any other musician on stage would. The machine extracts acoustic and musical parameters from what it hears, generates its own improvisation, and returns it to the room. Then Terraza listens and responds. The machine listens again and responds. And so on, until it is no longer clear who proposed what, or in what order.
Panel
11:00–12:00
AI & Music Open Forum
On the table are questions that actually matter today. What remains of human creativity when part of the process can be delegated? What does it mean to have your own when machines are learning everyone’s voice at once? Does post-AI-sensibility exist? Have we lost interest, and why? Which questions are we asking now that we were not asking five years ago? And which ones should we have asked earlier?
With François Pachet, Anna Xambó & Rob Clouth
Reinier Zonneveld presents R2 (b2b Al
Holographic AV)
Looking for the perfect collaborator for his famously bruising live sets, hard techno maestro Reinier Zonneveld realised that he could use AI technology to create a virtual creative partner. R2 is the work of months of training – exclusively on Reinier’s own music – and design, giving him the additional firepower he needs to supercharge his already intense live sets.
00:10–1:10
Stage: SonarHall
Friday 19
Panels
12:00–13:00
Sonic Experiments with Daito Manabe and Google DeepMind
A conversation about Lyria 3, live performance, and the grammar of human-AI music making.
13:45–14:30
Magda Polo Pujadas
& Miquel Ängel Pujana
How do you turn a DNA sequence into music? Biologist Magda Polo Pujadas (Grup EKHO,
Universitat de Barcelona) and cancer genome specialist Miquel Ängel Pujana (IDIBELL) present their
extraordinary interdisciplinary collaboration.
Showcase
18:00–19:30
AI Performance Playground – Hacklab Showcase
Twenty ‘hackers’ selected via open call have worked side-by-side for three days inside the AI Performance Playground, exploring the possibilities (and the boundaries) of co-creativity between humans and artificial intelligence in the field of music and sound. The presentation that concludes this intensive residency is its live materialisation.
Closing – Performance
19:45–20:30
dadabots
+
dadabots are CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, two music hackers who have spent the better part of a decade training neural networks to generate extreme music, from black metal to math rock to free jazz, using 24/7 livestreams on YouTube that never sleep and never repeat. Long before “AI music” became a marketing term, dadabots were already treating machine learning as an instrument: feral, unstable and gloriously wrong. Their work sits somewhere between (un)serious research, a running joke, a sonic ritual and sincere love letter to the most extreme corners of music history.
In their own words:
“Music hacker best amigos CJ & Zack will mf u up and explotar ur caps w/ insane tornados of sound. Really boring music… nothing to see here :|”
Mathematics and music have been intertwined for Daito Manabe since his university studies – which followed time spent as a DJ and playing in a jazz band – introduced him to the work of radical composer Iannis Xenakis, who pioneered the use of mathematical models in composition.
20:00–20:50
Stage: SonarHall
Expo+D. June 18+19.
Organised under seven categories and spread throughout various different spaces, Expo+D continues the spirit of Project Area, focusing on interactive and thought-provoking creations, divided into seven different categories. In this framework, AI & Music powered by S+T+ARTS propose to discover 5 exhibitors:
