Workshops

Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (JVLMA),
September 2024, Riga, Latvia

Nicola Privato is a PhD researcher at The Intelligent Instruments Lab ( http://iil.is/ ) in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he delves into how artificial intelligence is reshaping culture and social interactions through music practice. He will present a workshop in neural audio synthesis and interfaces for the technique, based on his research ( https://nicolaprivato.com/papers ). This workshop provides an in-depth exploration of Neural Audio Synthesis (NAS) techniques and their applications in contemporary music composition and performance. Participants will gain a solid understanding of the historical context, technical foundations, and practical usage of NAS tools, such as RAVE. Through hands-on tutorials and project development, attendees will learn to create and manipulate audio data, develop custom models, and integrate NAS into their artistic practices.

Humboldt Forum, June 2024, Berlin

Finely cutting food with a knife, tying a knot, driving a car. Many of the ordinary actions people perform every day require fine motor control and skilful manipulation of objects. Apparently simple mundane tasks are learnt through repeated practice and can be performed in many different ways—slowly, subtly, strongly, virtuosically fast. Similarly, playing a musical instrument involves coordination between perception and movement to perform the dynamic variations that underpin musical expression. In this collaborative project between UdK Berlin and Oxford University, we are looking at the act of pouring liquids into vessels and its underlying expressivity. We are collaborating with two professional musicians and a digital instruments designer to craft interactive sound vessels using machine learning and rapid prototyping techniques. Together with the musicians, we will examine how pouring actions can become music performance gestures.  

Project partners: • Federico Visi – Universität der Künste Berlin & Einstein Center Digital Future 
Robert Laidlow – Jesus College, University of Oxford 
Nicola Privato – Intelligent Instruments Lab,  University of Iceland 
Rebecca Lenton and Theo Nabicht at Ensemble KNM Berlin 
With support from Berit Greinke and the Wearable Computing Group at Universität der Künste Berlin
 

Zurich University of the Arts, ZhdK, Tenor 2024
April 2024, Zurich, Switzerland

Stacco is an instrument-score with embedded permanent magnets. It attracts and repels magnetic spheres and detects the changes in its magnetic fields upon interaction. It is designed to perform with neural audio synthesis models, in which sound features are represented and distributed within entangled multidimensional sonic spaces. Stacco allows drawing and embedding scores into the interface itself, and by bridging gesture and notation it overcomes some of the inherent limitations of traditional notational methods as applied to this novel technology.  

In this workshop, led together with Giacomo Lepri, participants were invited to compose and perform sketches for neural synthesis models, by drawing, embedding and layering tracing paper sheets on top of Stacco's surface. The workshop was followed by a discussion on the scores created by the participants and on the affordances of this compositional strategy as applied to neural audio synthesis.

AIMC 2023, Brighton, UK
August 2023
By Intelligent Instruments Lab, with Jack Armitage, Victor Shepardson, Nicola Privato, Teresa Pelinski, Adan L Benito Temprano ,Lewis Wolstanholme, Andrea Martelloni, Franco Santiago Caspe, Courtney N. Reed, Sophie Skach, Rodrigo Diaz ,Sean Patrick O'Brien , and Jordie Shier

Physical and gestural musical instruments that take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning to explore instrumental agency are becoming more accessible due to the development of new tools and workflows specialised for mobility, portability, efficiency and low latency. This full-day, hands-on workshop will provide all of these tools to participants along with support from their creators, enabling rapid creative exploration of their applications a musical instrument design. 

Fabryka Sztuky, Łódź, Poland
October 2023

This workshop is part of my ongoing research at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, and is aimed at exploring Stacco, the instrument that I developed together with Giacomo Lepri, as a support for composition.  Stacco allows to control neural synthesis model with high precision, but also to freely wander through unoredictable magnetic interactions. Each participant designed a musical score to be placed on top of Stacco and played. The outcomes of this workshop will be part of a future publication.
 

February 2023, Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavik.
By Intelligent Instruments Lab

A collaboration between the Intelligent Instruments Lab, Áki Ásgeirsson and Hallgrímskirkja.

The Intelligent Instruments Lab at the Iceland University of the Arts invites interested musicians to participate in a workshop where we will explore the use of creative AI technologies to play the organ at Hallgrimskirkja. We seek participants of diverse musical and cultural backgrounds, everyone is welcome, but the workshop size will be eight participants plus workshop leaders. We hope to have people in the workshop who want to use the organ in novel and unexpected ways, to make new sounds, tell new stories, develop new interfaces, have fun and redefine what organ music is about. Áki Ásgeirsson will be the workshop leader together with members of the lab.
The workshop will introduce creative AI technologies developed at the lab and people can use our systems such as the Notochord, Agential Scores, Scramble and more to control the organ. These involve AI and ALife, but participants can come up with their own systems too. We will also introduce our Organolib (technical library of sensors and actuators) which can be used to create novel interfaces. No technical skills are required for this workshop. We are hoping for a diverse group of people from all walks of music!
In the workshop we will learn about how the organ works, both for human players and how the organ’s MIDI connection can extend human capabilities, both in terms of performance and composition by using alternative intelligence.

In the workshop we will explore algorithmic music practices in the past, from ancient times to the current day, and move over to contemporary use of machine learning. We will also look at earlier works written for the organ in MIDI form as examples of how it is used.

The workshop will culminate with a concert at 18.00 on the Friday in Hallgrimskirkja where music from the workshop will be performed.

This laboratory started in 2020. It was conceived in collaboration with Il Portico, an amazing cultural association that promotes the integration and well-being of people with different abilities.  For the first edition we cooperated with the students of the secondary school G. Leopardi (Mira), that with Marco Privato designed a beautiful graphic score. The participants of the laboratories imagined and sketched on paper a series imaginary instruments, that were turned into real ones using tablets, smartphones and microcontrollers. We used IanniX to rehearse playing over graphic signs and to finally perform the complete score.

A video documentary of the laboratory will soon be available. 

This video features the score as imagined by the G. Leopadi secondary school students and the audio from the final performance.

Neural Audio Synthesis and Composition with AI

Everyday Objects of Musical Improvisation

Performance and Composition with AI

Sketching Magnetic Interactions with Neural Audio Synthesis

Agential Instruments Design

Stacco: Sketching Magnetic Interactions

Organic Intelligence

Music Therapy Workshop with Oncologic Patients

I.R.M.A.