How many are here who are musicians? And among those, how many that program? And that they use artificial intelligence tools to make art? Who is there that programs artificial intelligence with Neural Synthesis to make music?
Researcher CJ Carr, one of the gurus of this technology applied to musical creation, whose presence at the advanced music festival cannot be more than justified, took the pulse of his audience at Sonar D yesterday with this little questionnaire. Well, the 2023 edition, in which three decades of experience are celebrated, is largely dedicated to AI.
Sergio Caballero, for example, co-founder of Sónar and creator of its curious and influential image campaigns, has invited her to swallow each and every one of these works to turn them into an impressive installation, Processing. 30 years of Sónar , in which the images mutate for more than half an hour in a video creation in which Franc Aleu collaborates.
On this first day of Sónar, the issue of the climate emergency came to the fore at Stage D by Mediapro. The Forensic Architecture research group showed how it uses digital tools such as a simple mobile to defend causes and injustices that could well be artistic material for a museum or evidence in a trial. And a practical example was the case of a shipwreck between Turkey and Cyprus: with GPS it was shown that it happened in Greek waters. Jana Winderen also performed, who is dedicated to capturing sounds in Antarctica and is capable of capturing those of certain crustaceans, which are scandalous.
Daito Manabe, the Leonardo Da Vinci of Sónar, this Japanese technologist who regularly attends each festival, be it with interactive installations or shows with robots, will perform at this edition of the festival every day: today, Friday, with AI.
Returning to Sonaràgora – here the Domestic Data Streamers from Barcelona will appear later giving a conference on generative AI –, we meet CJ Carr, who continues with his talk full of gags and ironies about his own freakishness: “We made a 26-hour emo AI with Silverstein with a thousand songs…, which of course no one was going to listen to in three days, except me, who heard them three times”, he laughs.
This 35-year-old Bostonian who decided to make himself when he ran into a skeptical AI professor in college – “He told us it wouldn’t work, that it wouldn’t become a reality” – is the other half of the music hacker duo. and metal fans Dadabots. They have also shamelessly experimented with the limits of electronics through algorithms.
Hence, the rarer and more indigestible the sound that the machine vomits at him, the more his eyes will shine with enthusiasm at the result. Because as research director at Harmonai, CJ Carr has explored how to apply Stable Diffusion technology to music (the one that mixes the art of a Dalí with that of a Van Gogh). With individuals like him, everything that until now was reserved for supercomputers is now for domestic use.
Carr combines technicalities with examples that suggest multiple questions. Like that crazy idea he had to have Frank Sinatra sing a Britney Spears song. Will there be, like in Blade runner, ways to detect replicant music?
“Surely in five years we will see companies dedicated to distinguishing what is real and what is fake. But first we’ll see a lot of AI-generated music that won’t come out as such. It will be a problem, impossible to discover. And every time a fake detector appears, there will be a way to circumvent it, and the AI ??will be smarter and smarter, ”he tells La Vanguardia. And the culture of effort? “It will be replaced by the culture of the concept. Thinking of something and having it ready to the minute is something very powerful”.
To the question of whether it is the creative machine, his answer is immediate. “Sure,” replies Carr in his patchwork pants and bouncy hair. Finding unusual solutions to problems is also being creative, and AI is very good at it. Also, she has no experience of living in the world, but if we are able to describe a musical idea or concept to her and she is able to interpret it, it is a creative process.”
The Project Area, on the extensive surface that connects Sónar D and Sónar Village, is an exhibition space for projects designed to see and touch. And as explained by the director of Sónar D, Andrea Faroppa, this time it was by public announcement. In three weeks, 450 projects arrived and “of an unexpected quality,” she says.
If the area was designed for 20, they have managed to contain 85, welcoming the entire scientific sector, including the National Museum of Science and Technology and a selection of universities: the Norwegian Polytechnic, the Vienna Art…, and those of Barcelona. The Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, attends to the explanations…, and also the Mayor of Barcelona, ??Ada Colau, wanders around the venue. A forum co-designed with Hac Te has brought together representatives of the main European research centers, as well as museums and residences.
There, inventions of all kinds coincide, from the one that contrasts the “order of plants” with the “chaos of technology”, to the one that seeks to educate the eye to distinguish (or not) between reality, virtual reality and augmented reality. There is everything from the stand for modular brands and synthes for fans of musical creation to the one for the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which has been going to Sónar for ten years. And how could it be otherwise, they have addressed AI and have tried to see what is inside of the GPT Chat, that assistant that the world faces without knowing how intelligent and skillful it is.
Supercomputing has visualized it and exposed it as the statistical model that it is. And taking advantage of the fact that it is the 30th anniversary of Sónar, they have loaded it with the lyrics of the songs of all the artists who have performed at the festival: 40,000 songs, 10,000 artists…, which appear grouped according to affinity of languages, lyrics and styles. of music, with which it is observed how a kind of culture has been created.
Any conclusions from the analysis of 30 years at Sónar? What is the emotional trend of the music? “We see that it has turned from electronics to the urban and that today the urban has more weight,” explains Fernando Cucchietti, from Supercomputing. And on the emotional level, we see a small increase in sadness…, although joy has a brutal representation with respect to the neutral”.
