Gérard Assayag (ERC REACH) with Elaine Chew (ERC COSMOS project) and percussionist Thierry Miroglio have toured China’s main Music Conservatories from Beijing to Hangzhou to the Shangai Power Station of Art Museum to explain the research behind REACH and COSMOS, train the students to use the software tools (Somax2), and give several concerts on the « Boulez Reloaded » theme as a homage for Boulez 100 year worldwide commemoration.
The general schedule of the tour was:
- Sept 22, Lecture and workshop at CCOM the China Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing
- Sept 24, Performance of the piece « Boulez Reloaded » at the opening concert of MusicAcoustica festival, Zhejiang Conservatory of music in Hangzhou
- Sept 26, Lecture and master-class at the MusicAcoustica festival, Zhejiang Conservatory of music in Hangzhou
- Sept 27-29, 3 jurys for the competitions in electroacoustic music and AI generated Music at the Zhejiang Conservatory of music and Hangzhou Convention Center
- Oct 1, Concert « Boulez Reloaded » at the Power Station of Art, contemporary art museum of Shangai
With the support of Institut Français, Ambassade de France à Pékin, Consulat général de France à Shanghai, European Research Council, IRCAM
REACH Chinese Tour on Facebook:
FInd other photos and videos of the REACH Chinese Tour here.
MusicAcoustica Opening Concert, sept 24
Boulez Reloaded,
for Percussion, Piano and Electronic Music (world premiere)
Inspiring Composer: Pierre Boulez (France)
Live Electronics: Gérard Assayag (France)
Piano: Elaine Chew (UK)
Percussion: Thierry Miroglio (France)
Conceived in homage to Pierre Boulez on his centennial celebrated worldwide, “Boulez Reloaded” is a musical trio that brings to the live stage human-AI cocreativity, AI’s potential in precision music medicine, and skilled human improvisers. An open, semi-improvised dialog between multiple confronting music streams will draw material from the rich musical history that shaped Boulez and his music. Whilst the human protagonists grapple with the cocreative scenarios fed by the autonomous AI agents, their heartbeats, breathing, and heart rate variability—traces that form the basis of AI models for music theranostics—are captured by wearable sensors and visualised scientifically. The musical trio brings together technologies developed in ERC REACH and ERC COSMOS European project: Somax2 (human-AI improvisation) and heartfm (real-time capture and visualization of music and physiology). Elaine Chew will perform, adapt, and improvise on excerpts of pieces including Boulez’s Fragment d’une ébauche (1987), and Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901). Gérard Assayag will guide somax2’s improvisations towards different interaction strategies and sonic material drawn from Elaine’s live playing and recording of Boulez’s Sonata (1946), as well as corpus material from REACH musicians-in-residence including Jean-Brice Godet, Valérie Philippin, and Francesco Guerri. Thierry Miroglio will blend in with various percussions in a “tintinnabulant” (tinkling) spirit that Pierre Boulez would have much appreciated. The musician’s and the machine’s reciprocal listening and adaptation will produce rich and previously unheard combinations. The ebb and flow of the performers’ breathing, their ECG, heart rate, and heart rate variability, and the music played will be projected on a screen for real-time visualization, capturing the duo’s stress and physiological state changes, and showing entrainment with the music and musical interactions.
Power Station of Art, Shangai Museum of Contemporary art
« 1.5 Ton » experimental performance series, 13th anniversary of the PSA
Boulez Reloaded,
for Percussion, Piano and Electronic Music (world premiere)
Inspiring Composer: Pierre Boulez (France)
Live Electronics: Gérard Assayag (France)
Piano: Elaine Chew (UK)
Percussion: Thierry Miroglio (France)
This year marks the centenary of Boulez’s birth. The question we raise in Shanghai is not one of commemoration, but rather an examination: Can this unfinished journey continue today? On October 1, the first floor lobby of the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art will become such an experimental field. Pianist Zhou Yunian, percussion soloist Thierry Miroglio, and Gérard Assayag, director of research at IRCAM, France, will jointly present “Boulez Reloaded . ” Fragments of Boulez’s works and phrases of Ravel’s music are disassembled and reconstructed. The artificial intelligence system Somax2 generates responses in real time. The musicians’ heartbeats and breathing are captured and projected. « It is an open, semi-improvised dialogue between multiple, competing musical streams, » the artists wrote. Music is not reproduced. It is rekindled in the present moment, in the friction with the body and technology. The show is also an experiment in medicine and the future. The document states: “AI is driving music towards precision medicine, and the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of music is continuously expanding in cardiovascular disease research.” The audience will see not only the sound, but also how the performer’s breathing, heartbeat and tension interact with the music. It is no coincidence that PSA chose to present such a performance on its 13th anniversary. As China’s first state-owned contemporary art museum, PSA has been more than just a space for exhibitions since its inception. It is an institution that raises questions and creates scenes. “One and a Half Tons” is not a retrospective, but a public question: In an era dominated by consumption and algorithms, can art still shoulder the responsibility of exploration and innovation?
The « 1.5 Ton » experimental performance series is a music project independently organized by the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai. It is an experimental music brand created from a contemporary art perspective. Adhering to the artistic manifesto « Listening to Music, Gaining Strength, » the project invites performers to the museum to conduct multi-dimensional experiments with sound, while encouraging audiences to engage with their senses—sight, hearing, and touch—in the museum space. By incorporating sound practice into the context of contemporary art, « 1.5 Ton » not only demonstrates the interactive relationship between acoustic experimentation and spatial perception but also introduces new possibilities for artistic presentation in public cultural spaces.
Lecture and master-class, Zhejiang Conservatory, sept 26
Speaker: Gérard Assayag (France)、Elaine Chew (UK), Thierry Miroglio (France)
Boulez Reloaded, Reinventing the musical world of Pierre Boulez through interpretation and improvisation at the nexus of AI, Music and Health
Conceived in homage to Pierre Boulez on his centennial celebrated worldwide, « Boulez Reloaded » is a research and creation initiative bringing together two important European research projects. In COSMOS, AI enables the shift towards precision music medicine, advancing music’s diagnostic potential, facilitated by wearable technologies and real-time monitoring of musician’s physiological signals. In REACH, Human-AI live cocreation systems engage their digital listening, learning and generative skills into rich and versatile musical dialog trained on a chosen corpus of music. By committing these technologies to a collective act along with the human musicians, a variety of new possible readings of Boulez’ works such as the Piano Sonatas or Improvisations sur Mallarmé emerge, offering a way of bringing works and creators to life again beyond their finitude, a new means of in-depth musicological knowledge, and a resolute aesthetic and ethical approach to AI, allowing it to dedicate itself to human creativity and health.
In this musician-AI dialog, the music that Boulez loved, analyzed and conducted can slip in, notably Maurice Ravel whose 150th birthday we are also celebrating this year, extending the idea of re-creation to that of a meta-level dialogue of musics and influences. This master-class will detail the research and creation project, explain the analysis and musical choices guiding the « reloading » process, demonstrate the AI technologies, illustrating them through musical performances in which participants will be able to join with their own instruments.
Lecture and Workshop, CCOm Beijing, sept 22
Gérard Assayag (PI, ERC REACH), Thierry Miroglio (Soloist Percussionist)
Symbolic Interaction, Cocreativity and AI in the REACH Project
The REACH project is based on the hypothesis that co-creativity in cyber-human systems results from a an emergence of coherent behaviors based on non-linear regimes of event, structures and processes, leading to a rich co-evolution of musical forms. This outcome results from cross-learning processes between AI agents involving feedback loops and reinforcement mechanisms. A new approach to Creative AI, this conception has lead to the development of powerful tools for musician – machine interaction such as Somax2. Merging machine listening, machine learning, cognitive musical memory and corpus based synthesis, such systems react in a creative way to the live musician and create a sonic mixed reality by merging into the collective sound landscape. From there, REACH shows future directions for general creative AI by fostering the concept of « Interaction Learning » as a critical extension of the well established Representation Learning paradigm.
The Somax2 AI Agent System for Music Interaction
Somax2 is a cognitively inspired multi-agent AI system based on a reactive machine-listening component, smart interaction policies and a corpus-based generative engine. It creates machine improvisation flows that continuously maintain some form of coherence with the musical content of the corpuses it’s been trained on and the signals it receives from the musicians on stage. Somax2 agents can listen to each other as well, so as to create networks of virtual performers with both autonomy and attention to the ever-evolving musical context. The model accepts a variety of real-time controls acting on its generative process and interaction strategies, making it a digital instrument, or it can be easily scripted to fit in a compositional scheme. Somax2 is implemented in Max with a backend Python server, available as a user-friendly applicative patch or full-featured Max library for advanced Max programmers, online documentation and tutorials, video tutorials and demos and lots of videos documenting concerts and residences.
Gérard Assayag and Thierry Miroglio will offer a workshop for participants interested in coming together to learn about or enhance their knowledge of Somax2 through a series of interactive activities and discussions. Somax2 will be demonstrated on a variety of musical situations and sound materials, taking advantage of live interaction with percussionist Thierry Miroglio. Participants will be able to engage in practical experiments on Somax2 using their own instruments. Gerard and Thierry will also give a performance from their series « Boulez Reloaded », a research and creation initiative committing the REACH technology to a variety of new possible readings of Boulez’ works in the context of Boulez Centennial, extending the idea of music re-creation to that of a meta-level dialogue with AI offering a way of bringing works and creators to life again beyond their finitude.
