Elez / Boulaine : Boulez Homage : Fragment d'une ébauche and somax2 + heartfm (excerpt)
Channel: cosmos
Date: 2024-03-01

Elaine Chew, piano 
Gérard Assayag, somax2 

Semi-improvised dialog between dueling musical streams with visuals of performer physiology. 
Full performance: https://cosmos.isd.kcl.ac.uk/?p=4758

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Conceived as an anticipated hommage to Pierre Boulez, a year before the centenary celebrations, this duet piece creates an open, semi-improvised dialog between dueling musical streams drawing from the rich musical history that shaped Boulez and his music, and from original sonic materials (« Boulez Reloaded »). 

Elaine Chew performs, adapts, reimprovises excerpts of pieces including Boulez's Sonata (1946) and Fragment d'une ébauche (1987), Messiaen's Vingt Regards (1944), and Ravel's Jeux d'eau (1901). The Somax2 cocreative AI program, based on REACH research, listens to Elaine's playing and uses its generative model to react to it and intervenes in an improvised manner, continuously keeping pace with both the live musician and its own underlying musical logic. Elaine'sperformance transforms the pieces through extreme distortions of timings and expressions in response to Somax's generative agent repartees to her actions at the keyboard, so the musician and the machine’s reciprocal listening and adaptation produce rich and previously unheard combinations. Gérard Assayag guides the somax2 agents in a way that is itself an improvisation, by steering now and then the system towards different interaction strategies or sonic materials depending on the musical situation. In this cocreative extreme performance, the players' electrical heart activity, breathing, and stress will be projected visually in real time thanks to COSMOS-HEART.FM technology. 

European projects ERC REACH (Raising CoCreativity in CyberHuman Musicianship, PI G. Assayag), ERC COSMOS (Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures , PI E. Chew). 

Thanks to Jean-Brice Godet, Valérie Philippin, Benny Sluchin, Francesco Guerri, and other REACH music research residents, who help us by training Somax2 with their wonderful musical material, and the praised engineers Joakim Borg (Somax2) and Charles Picasso (HeartFM) for their software development. 

https://reach.ircam.fr 
https://cosmos.isd.kcl.ac.uk 

Part of Mystery Machines (closing concert) 
https://www.ystmusic.nus.edu.sg/event/2024-02-22-mathemusical-encounters-closing-concert/ 

Mathemusical Encounters in Singapore (MES2024) 
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music & Institute for Mathematical Sciences 
National University of Singapore 

22 February 2024