Hyphae
Hyphae is an album of improvisations by Andromeda is Coming — Charles Martin and Dr Alec Hunter — recorded in late 2024 at the ANU School of Music. The sessions used our IMPSY-powered intelligent instruments, which listen to our MIDI controllers and continue performing when we stop, pushing our synths into sonic states we’d never have reached on our own.
Read more about the recording sessions: Recording Hyphae with Intelligent Musical Instruments.
Hyphae is still in progress — more updates to come when it’s ready for release.
Preview Track
A bonus track released as a preview of the album.
Liner Notes
Letting things grow.
Hyphae is the co-creative project of Charles Martin and Alec Hunter performing electronic instruments in collaboration with two interconnected AI agents. Reacting against big-tech steal-all-your-art approaches to creative artificial intelligence, this project emphasises human touch and gesture with continuous computational input and bespoke, self-collected data.
Our work connects our unique synth and field-recording practice with, Charles Martin’s IMPSYpi, an intelligent music system that attempts to perform like a human by controlling parameters on our synths over a MIDI connection. The IMPSYpis listen to signals from our physical music controllers, and attempt to continue performing when we stop. IMPSYpi is deliberately small-data, using an AI model trained on our own improvisation. The 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 in-human, 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.
Hyphae articulates a truly co-creative practice where the output sound relies critically on both the artistic voice of the people performing and the computational model to make music that has never been heard before.
Tracking took place in December 2024 at the Big Band Room, ANU School of Music.
Credits
- Alec Hunter: laptop synths and samples with IMPSYpi instance 1
- Charles Martin: iPad synths and samples with IMPSYpi instance 2