Eryk Salvaggio

AI Workshop

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC CENTRE
Tuesday 2/4/24, 3–5pm
Duration, 2 hours (including break)
Tickets: €5 (includes refreshments)

What is artificial intelligence, and what does it mean for musicians? Beyond automated songwriting, are there other ways to define and design artificial intelligence in the making of sound and music? In this workshop, Eryk Salvaggio (cyberneticforests.com) -- an artist and media theorist who uses AI tools to critique AI -- presents an overview of creative strategies for deploying machine learning that respects human creativity. He will share his process of scoring music from the migrations of Golden Eagles using machine learning; his sonic explorations of electric mushrooms, and what he has learned from the creative misuse of AI music-making with his "cyborg pop" project, The Organizing Committee. After the talk, participants will be given an overview of AI music tools, and techniques, ranging from the experimental to mainstream.

This workshop is suitable for musicians, composers and concert-goers, or anyone with an interest in electronic music and how it is composed, or how technology can be integrated into composition and performance.

"For two years, AI has dominated the field of visual creativity. AI for music is on the horizon. I hope musicians can learn something from the visual arts, to use these tools in ethical ways that keep human creativity at the center of whatever comes next." (Eryk Salvaggio)

Eryk Salvaggio is a musician, visual artist, culture writer and tech policy researcher. For 25 years, he has been working with digital technology as a way to learn and critique the very technology he uses. His work is being shown at the CCCB in Barcelona, the Galerie Sindelfingen in Germany, and he has given talks on AI, art & culture in forums such as SXSW (Texas), the hacker convention DEFCON 31 (Las Vegas), and the ACMI (Melbourne). His musical projects, The Organizing Committee, makes use of multiple AI and generative musical techniques inspired by Kraftwerk and Fluxus; he is also the producer of "Worlding," which applied cybernetic principles to create a generative music system from the voltage spikes of mushrooms.

Music Current workshops are supported by the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland (www.cmc.ie). Composer participants resident on the island of Ireland, travelling from outside Dublin, may apply to CMC for a bursary to cover the cost of travel, subsistence and workshop entry fee (up to a maximum amount of €80) by contacting festival staff when attending workshop events, or by contacting info@musiccurrent.ie