Studium Generale - Giusy Caroso & Umut Eldem

Intention and Emergence: Human and Machine in Musical Co-Creation

The rapid development of musical AI raises real concerns: authorship, the displacement of human creativity, and the loss of cultural and bodily music-making. The growing accessibility and the responsible use cases, in turn, also opens new co-creative possibilities in contemporary performance.

Two stand out: small-scale AI tools built for specific aesthetic needs, and personalized systems in which multiple human-machine interfaces shape one another in real time. The result is a practice where performers continually collaborate with non-human agents, in an interplay of intention and emergence that blurs the sonic distance between human and machine.

In this lecture-performance, Umut Eldem and Giusy Caruso share the CREATIE group's research into small-scale machine-learning tools developed from the researchers' own musical practices. Through live demonstrations of these musical ML tools, they explore what such systems mean for contemporary music together with a performance and discussion of their implications for creative and performance practice.