Dr Alexander Hunter of the School of Music has been working with Dr Charles Martin and his students from the School of Computing to design “intelligent instruments” and perform with them on a live stage. This innovative project explores the intersection of technology and music, showcasing the potential of AI in creative arts.

“Music is a uniquely human endeavour, the auditory window into the soul, discovered through improvisation, honed through collaboration.

In recent years, researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) have introduced artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help diagnose diseases, co-pilot rescue helicopters, and theorise about the origin of the Universe. To date, however, there are no mainstream musical instruments that apply generative AI. That may be about to change.

‘We’re creating new kinds of musical instruments,’ said Dr Charles Martin of the ANU College of Engineering, Computing & Cybernetics (CECC). ‘A really good way to explore how they might behave is to try them out in a free improvisation performance.’”

In a recent Andromeda is Coming and Artificially Intelligent Friends concert held at the ANU School of Music, Dr Alexander Hunter, along with Dr. Charles Martin and his students from the School of Computing, “unveiled six new instruments, each embedded with AI and augmented reality components.”

“The concert’s most haunting moments came when undergraduate Computing and Music student Sandy Ma performed by slowly pressing her hands upon a quilt embedded with a Beagle Bone computing system. The human/computer duet unspooled a nebulous soundscape that felt and sounded like a scene from a movie, a guarded venture into a digital underworld where dissonant sounds — somewhere between whale song and Mechagodzilla — waited in ambush.”

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What’s that sound? A duet of humans and AI in concert.

More about Dr Alexander Hunter.