Recording Hyphae with Intelligent Musical Instruments
15 Jan '25
In late 2024, Dr Alec Hunter and I spent several days together at the ANU School of Music recording improvisations for a new album, Hyphae, the latest project from our ongoing collaboration, Andromeda is Coming.
The recording sessions extended the practice we first showed publicly at the Andromeda is Coming and Artificially Intelligent Friends concert in May 2024. Over the course of 2024, we continued developing our intelligent musical instruments, and these sessions were a chance to explore what they could do in a more focused recorded setting.
Intelligent Instruments
The centrepiece of both our setups is IMPSYpi — an AI musical instrument built on my IMPSY platform. IMPSYpi connects to our synths via MIDI and controls synthesis parameters in real time. It listens to our physical MIDI controllers and, when we stop playing, attempts to continue performing on its own.
Alec ran his intelligent instrument through Ableton Live on a laptop; I used AUM on an iPad. Both setups let IMPSYpi interact directly with our synth parameters, pushing sounds in directions neither of us would have taken on our own.
Small Data AI
IMPSYpi is deliberately a small-data AI system, a contrast to the big-tech, scrape-everything approach to creative AI. The AI model powering it was trained on roughly an hour of improvisation that I recorded with an 8-input MIDI controller.
The result is imperfect but intriguing. Sometimes IMPSYpi smoothly shifts a single parameter, much as a human player would. Sometimes it flips all eight parameters in rapid, inhuman jumps, leaving our synths in sonic states we’d never have reached ourselves.
Liner Notes
Letting things grow.
IMPSYpi is an AI musical instrument that attempts to perform like a human by controlling parameters on our synths over a MIDI connection. The IMPSYpis listen to the signal from our physical MIDI controllers, and attempt to continue performing when we stop. In contrast with the big-tech steal-all-your-art approach to creative artificial intelligence, IMPSYpi is a small-data AI system. We used an AI model trained on about an hour of improvisation that Charles recorded with an 8-input MIDI controller. The trained AI model is beautifully imperfect; sometimes it smoothly changes individual parameters much as we do, sometimes it changes all eight parameters in ultra-quick jumps, leaving our synths in inhuman, but fascinating sonic states.
Even though our IMPSYpis are trained on human data, we don’t expect them to be humans. They blend into our instruments, pushing our sounds into unexpected places, leaving us to update our creative intentions moment-to-moment.
The goal here is not to make music with AI that just ends up imitating a larger ensemble. AI should help people make music that has never been heard before.
Hyphae is still in progress — more updates to come when it’s ready for release.