Orpheus’s Machines

• On this occasion, the Musica ex Machina exhibition at Pavilion B will remain open until 7 pm

Music is often seen in a binary state of human or mechanical. In the context of the current exhibition Musica ex Machina, artist-researchers from the Orpheus Institute, Ghent (BE), explore the space in between. They present new and extended instruments, novel interfaces, repurposed everyday objects and the space itself. We experience the interplay of musicians and algorithms, from the mechanical to AI, in composition, improvisation and installation, to probe the inherent technicity of music and music-making.

Programme

Sound installations | 19h–19h30

• Simon Waters – Line

  
  

  Line critiques current notions of immersivity, localising and physicalising sound across a single line of loudspeakers to enhance its ‘comprehensibility’. Algorithmic structures afford intimate engagements with musical time at every scale from the micro-sonic to the historical.

  
  
• Nicolas Collins – Long Fetch

  
  

  The four microphones in Long Fetch switch from speaker to speaker as soon as they start to feed back, producing pitches that vary with the distance between mike and speaker. These musical patterns respond to sounds in the room, both ambient and performed. The algorithm («turn off, change channel, turn on») is simple, but the result is elegantly complex.

  
  

Performances | 19h30–21h

• Nicholas Brown – Bellfounding

  
  

  Nicholas Brown will perform excerpts from his Bebung Project, a series of compositions for the electroacoustic clavichord he designed and built in 2023. The set includes Bellfounding (2024), which uses machine learning to reimagine William Byrd’s sixteenth-century keyboard piece, The Bells.

  
  
• MTT with Matthew Wright – Five interventions derived from Frederic Rzewski — Second Structure (1972)

  
  

  Rzewski’s Second Structure was composed for the innovative improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva in 1972. It plays with phenomena of memory, listening, imagining and planning to dissolve clear distinctions between composition and improvisation. Four ‘off the shelf’ technologies – turntable, dj mixer, Ableton Live software and multichannel interface – are used to sample the live performers. Wright’s approach is partly influenced by Jamaican dub, where asymmetric delay patterns are used to shatter and diffuse the input signal to multiple speakers. These patterns also pass through ‘beat repeat’ units that slice and redistribute the delayed signal, creating a stuttering collision between human input and algorithmic output.

  
  
• Magno Caliman – Machina

  
  

  Machina is a performance for tabletop electric guitar, activated via hacked EBows, along with small preparations on the instrument strings. It leverages three distinct forces: deterministic looping algorithms which control the EBows functioning; the inherent non-linear, repetition-resisting behaviour of vibrating strings when tampered; and the desire for some level of control at different levels —temporal, aesthetic, performative.

  
  
• Chonglian Yu – Rewinding the Moments

  
  

  Rewinding the Moments captures and fragments subtle changes within a sustained practice of staring at a computer screen without given context. Through data processing, unnoticed variations—such as micro-expressions and ambient fluctuations—become the computational material for sonification and visual parameters.

  
  
• Juan Parra Cancino / Brice Soniano / Jonathan Impett – Three States of Wax

  
  

  Three States of Wax takes its cue from philosopher Michel Serres’ investigation of the nature of material in current research. Material is not static, but a dynamic nexus of information, bearing the traces of its every interaction. Continual learning systems are guided by machine analysis of the evolving state of the improvisation, responding to live input and to their own history. A parallel voice of analog sound reflects the behaviours of the AIs themselves.

  
  
• Andrea Agostini – Urbanistica Nomadica

  
  

  Urbanistica Nomadica is constituted of processes that are conceptually simple but sonically complex, combining the nomadic spontaneity of free improvisation with the carefully planned urbanism of electroacoustic composition.

  
  
• Elise Salverda – Clock time

  
  

  In relation to the piano as “eighty-eight tuned drums” (Val Wilmer on Cecil Taylor, As Serious As Your Life, 1977), Clock time explores the acoustic resonance of a mantelpiece clock with five brass chime bars and hammer mechanism, maker unknown.