out of body (2021) 2'

program note

My piece for Hilary Hahn is called ‘out of body’ and I wrote it with the help of notes generated through an artificial intelligence program.

I began with the idea of writing a piece in which a computer and I were both compositionally equal. Or at least as equal as a flawed, temperamental human and a coolly calculating piece of software could be.

My solution was to have an equal number of notes supplied both by me and by the computer, and that the notes would alternate between each other – one from the human, one from the machine. In this way the whole piece could be a unity, made from an equal mingling of man and machine.

I wrote a bunch of double and triple stops for a solo violin, which had some rhythmically controlled spaces in between them, and with the help of my friend and tech guru Todd Reynolds, we fed what I had written into the AI, asking it to listen to what I wrote and generate more of what it thought I was doing.

This generated several different streams of notes, each apparently learning something different from my original inputs.

I chose one stream, then interleafed it manually into the notes I had written myself. I waited to start adding the computer notes until we were a few phrases into the piece, so that we could follow which part was which, and this of course meant that the AI part would hang over at the end for a few phrases, after my original part ran out.

I am proud to say that I did not cheat at all! I laid all the computer notes into my original, in whatever order the computer gave them to me.

It is true, however, that the AI generated many options, and I only chose the one that was most aesthetically pleasing to me. I never asked myself which option was most aesthetically pleasing to the computer.