Paola Prestini / Excerpts from Sensorium Ex

Composer Paola Prestini and a group of advanced technologists have exploited AI to enable non-vocal and other performers to have a voice, leveraging the power of AI for artistic access and possibility.

Created by Prestini and librettist Brenda Shaughnessy and directed by Jay Scheib, the narrative of Sensorium Ex is a dystopian sci-fi tale that explores the intersection of corporate greed, artificial intelligence and the fundamental nature of the human voice. Set in a future dominated by a global entity known as 'CORP,' the story revolves around the struggle for agency and the definition of humanity. 

Robin Coops + Eric Magnée + Thyrza Coenraad / In The Ring

Robin Coops’ In The Ring is an experimental AI opera role-playing game inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner, which examines AI ethics and power structures. The project explores how audience participation can shape story, music, and space, while reflecting on the power structures embedded in technology. Using their smartphones, participants make real-time decisions that directly influence the narrative, soundscape, and visual world, as a live opera singer performs the continuously evolving tale. By transforming abstract debates about AI and Big Tech into tangible, lived consequences, In The Ring invites audiences to confront a pressing question: who truly holds power in a world driven by technology? In this session, the team behind In The Ring – led by led by director-composer Coops together with digital storyteller, creative technologist and composer Eric Magnée, and social designer Thyrza Coenraad – will present the concept, share the key questions driving the project, and offer a short live demonstration of the work, which will have its premiere next year.

Harry Yeff (Reeps100) + Patricia Auchterlonie

Artist Harry Yeff (Reeps100) uses AI technology to bend and break the emergent possibilities of the human voice.

Over the last 10 years Yeff has fused his voice practice with technology, pushing extended vocal technique into uncharted territory. An AI research continuation of his co-directorial work with Leipzig Opera House on Fusion, -transference- is performed with Patricia Auchterlonie and references AI's role in transcending human ability in chess, leading on how ethical AI processes can be wielded to push, oppose and challenge the current known limit of the human voice. Seeking new tone, pattern and emotion through the partnership of human and generative voice.

Jennifer Walshe + EXAUDI + Dadabots

Jennifer Walshe has been at the vanguard of experimental composition and AI for many years, and is a leading voice in the imaginative and provocative conversation between AI and classical music.

Walshe uses AI to imagine an alternative early history of Western music. Dadabots, the duo of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, trained their neural network on Walshe’s voice, producing 841 files over 40 generations of training. In A Late Anthology of Early Music, Walshe maps these files – examples of how a machine learning system learned to listen to and replicate her voice – onto key works from the Western music repertoire, the system’s understanding of her voice evolving in tandem with the evolution of a newly-constructed music history. This presentation, in collaboration with vocal ensemble EXAUDI, features new versions of canonical works by composers including Hildegard von Bingen, Adam De La Halle, Perotinus, Machaut, Dunstable, Ockeghem, Dowland, Gesualdo and many more.