3rd Conference on AI Music Creativity
Music Session
Composition & Sound Design/Synthesis #1
Wednesday, 14 September 2022
22:00 JST (UTC+9)

William A. Thompson IVAugustín J. Spinetto, Andrés Duarte Loza
Kiyoshi Furukawa, Yota Morimoto
Axel Chemla–Romeu-Santos

Seven Piano Etudes Speaks the Moody Machine30-hour dream
Beethoven meets the Wizard of Oz
Aletheia

Seven Piano Etudes
Speaks the MoodyMachine
Seven Piano Etudes Speaks the Moody Machine was created via machine learning with the goal ofhybridizing the musical qualities of three different emotional states of human speech with four different
styles of piano music. Through this process amused, angry or neutral speech has been melded withpiano music created by Thelonious Monk, James Booker, Mara Gibson and William Thompson. TheEtudes intended to be performed by a human pianist are titled after notable events from the industrial
revolution while those intended for machine performance are titled after future events regarding the riseof artificial intelligence as predicted by the author Ray Kurzweil. In the final etude both perform together
representing the singularity. The contrast between events in the industrial revolution and future eventsis intended to entice listeners to reconsider each from different perspectives of time.
I. 1440 Type (for human performer)
II. 2029 Claim of Consciousness (for machine performer)
III. 1712 Steam Engine (for human performer)
IV. 2030 Mind Upload (for machine performer)
V. 1844 Telegraph (for human performer)
VI. 2040 Full Immersion (for machine performer)
VII. 2045 The Singularity (for human and machine performer)
William A. Thompson IV or “WATIV” is a composer, pianist, electronic musician and educator. His uniquemusic has attracted the attention of NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the BBC. Thompson’s art has
been most profoundly impacted by his one year tour of duty spent in Baghdad during the Iraq War in
2004 as a Counterintelligence Agent. Thompson studied jazz piano at the University of New Orleans andearned a Masters degree in jazz studies. In 2022 Thompson earned a PhD as a part of Louisiana State
University’s Experimental Music and Digital Media program and began synthesizing music and humanspeech as sound compositions. Today Thompson is an Assistant Professor of Sound at The Universityof Southern Mississippi where he teaches and researches audio technology and music. In addition, hecontinues his career as an improvising pianist and computer musician in the New Orleans area andabroad.

30-hour dream30-hour dream is the first collaboration between the composers Andrés Duarte Loza and Agustín Spinetto,
who live in Argentina and Japan respectively (a distance that takes 30 obnoxious hours by plane tocover). For this composition, Andrés created an extensive and rich folder of audio samples using theJapanese music instrument Koto. Agustín assembled these samples with Japanese percussion andused AudioStellar music software to create this performance, where the several Koto’s looped melodies
are assisted by AI and modified by an autonomous generative process that gradually replaces samples
from these loops with other samples that the software considers that shares some sonic characteristics. In addition, AudioStellar is used as an interface for controlling parameters of an external hardware
synthesizer. AIMC’s Special Call for Music Generation was the inspiration for these 2 composers, whofeel somehow attached by an invisible rope.
Augistín Jorge Spinetto is an Argentinian musician, bachelor in Electronic Arts (UNTREF) and graduatedwith a Master’s Degree in Music Creativity and the Environment at the Tokyo University of the arts.
Spinetto has been working with electronic instruments and new technologies for music experimentation
purposes. His performances goes from Live Electronics concerts to Art Installations in collaboration
with visual and plastic artists. This year, the music result of his first 3 years of studies in Tokyo ismanifested in his new album “Made In Ueno”.
Andrés Duarte Loza is a composer, guitar and Japanese koto player from Argentina. He creates andperforms in contemporary music, popular music, live electronics performances and traditional Japanesemusic. Duarte Loza is a professor and researcher in the Faculty of Arts (UNLP), and he also teaches in theSuperior Institute of Japanese Studies. Andrés earned a Bachelor degree in Music from IUNA, a Bachelor
degree in Music Composition from UNLP and his MA in Music Creativity and the Environment from theTokyo University of Arts, Japan. Since 2009 he has been studying Japanese koto (Ikuta-ryu) with theMaster Chieko Mori in Japan.

Beethoven meets theWizard of Oz
The developed system takes two audio-visual inputs A (in this case, “For Elise”) and B (“The Wizard ofOz”), and reconstructs B according to the sonic structural features of A. The result is such a montage of“The Wizard of Oz” whose soundtrack is heard almost like “For Elise.” The goal of our project/composition
is to use AI and machine learning to design a new musical experience, a different way to enjoy music, anadventure for the ears, where the music is both “The Wizard of Oz” and “For Elise”. Our brain will follow
the familiar melody of ”For Elise” and search for “For Elise” in a series of short fragments of “The Wizardof Oz”, and our consciousness will move back and forth between Beethoven and “The Wizard of Oz” inour memory, shaking our whole brain like a dizzy spell. You will experience a new way of listening.
Kiyoshi Furukawa. Born in Tokyo in 1959, he began composing under Yoshiro Irino and moved toGermany after graduating from high school. He studied composition with Isang Yun at the Berlin
University of the Arts and with György Ligeti at the Hamburg University of Theater and Music. In 1991
He was an artist-in residence at ZKM (Germany). For the opening of ZKM’s new building in 1997, hewas commissioned to create and compose a multimedia opera entitled “To the Unborn Gods”. Since
2000, he has been a professor at the Department of Intermedia Arts, Tokyo national University of the Arts.
Yota Morimoto is a Japanese composer and researcher born in Brazil based in the Netherlands. Heholds a master’s degree in Sonology from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and Ph.D. in composition from the University of Birmingham UK. His works attend to the materiality of sound and explores
non-conventional approaches to generating and transmitting sonic matters. He composes for musicians, ensembles and public spaces, presents works at musea, festivals and conferences such as Kunstmuseum [The Hague], Gaudeamus [Utrecht] NWEAMO [Morelia], Transmediale [Berlin], ISEA [Dortmund,Istanbul], makeart [Poitier], EMUfest [Rome], ICMC [Belfast, Perth, Athens], SMC [Porto, Barcelona] andSICMF [Seoul].

Aletheia“Reality cannot be read; it can be garnered, be tied up, and at best be swindled.” Aletheia is a musical piecebased on exploring, transforming, hacking, bending, and interplaying with audio and image generativemodels. Referring to the pre-socratic notion of aletheia, this piece illustrates the discovery of reality ofneural audio synthesis models by going from a pure phenomenological perception to an imitation game,yielding to a deranging and coercive version of reality. Besides attempting a reflexive work between
philosophical aspects of reality and exploration of model’s rules through deviation, aletheia is motivatedby the experimental development of new approaches to compose and interact with neural generativemodels, and by which new aesthetics they can provide.
Axel Chemla–Romeu-Santos is a researcher, musician, and producer. After a PhD in neural audio synthesis between IRCAM (Paris) and LIM (Milano), he is actually post-doctorate in the ACIDS-IRCAM researchgroup, where he works on real-time neural audio synthesis, model hijacking and research & creation processes. Besides his academic work, he graduated in computer music in CRR93 and worked as composerin the theater collective Théâtre de la Suspension. He is also co-founder and the w.lfg.ng collective, member of the brutal pop member Daim™ , and has his one-man band Kenoma.