The Reach Collective has been on a one week California Tour (june 1 to 6) thanks to the support of Villa Albertine, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC Riverside, giving a series of concerts, lectures and workshops. Here are some traces of the tour.
Organization
The Ircam REACH collective is coming to California for a series of workshops, master-classes and concerts and will be in Riverside on June 5/6 for the CCMSAI. REACH is formed by artists-researchers Gérard Assayag, Marco Fiorini, and Mikhail Malt with composers Lara Morciano and Jose-Miguel Fernandez and percussionist Thierry Miroglio. REACH has developed Somax2, a highly successful AI-driven improvisation system. Showcasing creative and ethical Live human-AI cooperation, the California tour will engage musicians, composers, and researchers in exploring AI’s role in improvisation, composition, and performance across diverse musical genres, including contemporary, electronic, jazz, and popular music. Activities include workshops and master-classes, where participants engage with Somax2 with their instrument or compositional project, lectures on AI’s impact on creativity, aesthetics and ethics, and concerts including live interaction between REACH people, local musicians and AI. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between music, AI, and the humanities, this project will expand artistic and academic networks, enhance accessibility through recorded sessions, and lay the groundwork for future creation in AI-assisted music-making.
The focus will be on Somax2, a successful AI-driven improvisation system developed by the REACH collective at Ircam, which enables real-time, interactive cooperation with human musicians. Somax2 features a cognitive learning model and can listen, react, and take coherent musical decisions along with the musicians without superseding them but contributing to their collective creation. It is a unique tool for composition, improvisation and live performance. This tour will highlight its potential for human/AI cocreativity, demonstrating how AI can transform the creative experience.
The REACH collective will lead interactive sessions where musicians and composers engage directly with Somax2, exploring its artistic, technical, and esthetical implications, in valuable hands-on experimentation with AI in an unseen creative setting.
While Somax2 is an exemplary system for AI-driven improvisation, the core of this discussion must revolve around the shared agency of both human and machine performers. By expanding the focus beyond AI methodologies, this action will explore how AI challenges and redefines human creativity, consciousness, and artistic expression.
The integration of AI in music raises fundamental questions about human creativity. How do algorithms reshape intuition, decision-making, and musical aesthetics? How does AI influence the perception of musical authorship? These theoretical inquiries will align the master-classes and performances with humanities-based perspectives, drawing from historical, esthetical and social discussions on human-machine interaction.
Somax2
Somax2 is a cognitively inspired multi-agent AI system based on a reactive machine-listening component, smart interaction policies and a corpus-based Somax2generative 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.
REACH
https://reach.ircam.fr/
Somax2 Project Resources
http://repmus.ircam.fr/somax2
SCHEDULE
Monday june 1
University of California at Santa Barbara (Host : Professor Tatiana Catanzaro)
9 am – 12 pm: Workshop – Deep Listening (Mikhail Malt) (@ the Department of Music, 2218)
1 pm – 2:30 pm: MAT Seminar Series – Gérard Assayag Lecture at MAT (REACH Project & Somax2) – (@ Elings 2611)
11 am – 5:00 pm : installation and preparation for the concert
6 pm – 7 pm : Concert by the Reach Collective and Invitees (at the Department of Music, 1145)
Tuesday June 2
University of California at Santa Barbara (Host : Professor Tatiana Catanzaro)
10 am – 12 pm: Workshop – Somax2 on interaction with performers, the REACH Collective (@ the Department of Music, 2218)
3 pm – 5 pm: Workshop – Somax2 for composers and programmers (he REACH Collective) @ the Department of Music, 2218)
Wednesday June 3
University of California at Irvine (host : Professor Mari Kimura)
3 pm-6 pm Workshop Somax2 for performers and composers (the Reach Collective)
8 pm- 9pm Concert (the Reach Collective with the students)
Friday June 5
University of California at Riverside (host : Professor Paulo Chagas)
In the frame of the symposium Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition (https://audiovisualmusic.ucr.edu/)
8 pm-10 pm Concert by the REACH Collective and Invitees
Saturday June 6
University of California at Riverside (host : Professor Paulo Chagas)
In the frame of the symposium Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition (https://audiovisualmusic.ucr.edu/)
4 pm – 7 pm Workshop Somax2 for performers and composers (the Reach Collective)
8pm – Final Concert, with the REACH COllective and the participants to the workshop
UC Santa Barbara
https://www.campuscalendar.ucsb.edu/event/conemporary-music-series-festival
tatianacatanzaro.net/ircamucsb/
UC Santa Barbara June 1 Concert
Workshops
Somax2 Workshop
This workshop will present Somax2, an application for improvisation and musical composition, and it will focus on its concepts, UI, control, learning, architectural aspects and musical scenarios. Concrete musical examples with Somax2 will be demonstrated, as the workshop will possibly end with a demo and a musical performance in which participants will be able to join together and create a short set of improvised music.
The workshop hosted by the REACH collective team, including Marco Fiorini, Mikhail Malt and Gérard Assayag, is organised for participants interested in coming together to learn about or enhance their knowledge of Somax2 through a series of interactive activities and discussions. Participants will engage in practical demonstrations and exercises on Somax2, with the possible goal of participating in a performance featuring improvisation and composed works employing Somax2.
Deep Listening® Workshop
This workshop proposes an immersive experience inspired by the practice of Deep Listening®, developed by composer Pauline Oliveros, that we could summarize as
« Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening. »
(Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009 (2010), p. 76.)
And
“…listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing.”
(Pauline Oliveros Quantum Listening p.29)
The session will explore attentive listening as a creative and collective practice. Through body and breath work, listening exercises and Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations and Deep Listening Pieces, participants will investigate their own hearing and listening.
“Deep Listening is a practice consisting of listening and sounding exercises and pieces I and others have composed since 1970. … Deep Listening is for musicians as well as participants from other disciplines and interests. Previous musical training is not required.”
No musical background is required — only curiosity and openness to listening differently.
This workshop will be facilitated by Mikhail Malt, computer musician, composer, and EAR-tificate holder by the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Monday, June 1st, 2026 / 1pm Elings Hall room 2611 and via Zoom
UCSB MAT Seminar Series 2025 • 2026 / Spring 2026
« Gerard Assayag : Symbolic interaction and cocreativity in the REACH Project«
Speaker: Gérard Assayag, Electronic Musician, Senior Researcher at IRCAM & Founder of the Music Representation Team in Machine Musicianship.
Abstract
The REACH project is based on the hypothesis that co-creativity in cyber-human systems results from 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 agents involving feedback loops and reinforcement mechanisms. A new approach to Creative AI, this conception has led 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.
Bio
Gérard Assayag is an electronic musician and senior researcher at IRCAM.. He is head and founder of the Music Representation research team which explores Machine Musicianship, an ensemble of computational methods for modeling the structures and processes of music from a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary points of views. He has been head of the Ircam research Lab for several years. Assayag led the Music Representations team to international recognition through the production of flagship computer music softwares s.a. OpenMusic, AnteScofo, Orchidea, Omax, Somax, Djazz, Dyci2, RAVE, and hundreds of scientific publications, PhD and Master’s work with a major impact on computer music research and creation. Assayag has produced seminal work on Computer Assistance to Composition, Creative AI and Machine Improvisation and has been recently awarded the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant for his career achievement and vision for the future in his project REACH: Raising Co-creativity in Cyber-Human Musicianship. Assayag has performed and invited dozen of world-class musicians to perform at the IMprotech Workshop-Festivals.
UC Irvine June 3
The Concert at UC Irvine was prepared by a series of online workshops conducted by Marco Fiorini and gérard Assayag with the students in the Intermedia class of Mari Kimura (Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT))
Intermedia: Improvising with SOMAX
Instructors: Mari Kimura (UCI/ICIT), Gerard Assayag, Marco Fiorini. (IRCAM)
Somax is a software for real-time improvisation and composition using AI with machine listening, a cognitive memory activation model. As a SOMAX now for several years, especially in recent ImproTech (last year was in Paris) festivals organized by IRCAM.
The class will invite IRCAM’s Gerard Assayag, the head of this IRCAM’s Musical Representation Team and REACH project, and Marco Fiorini, PhD candidate at IRCAM.
Final Concert June 3, List of Qustions and Answers
The Whole course Syllabus and concert preparation is on line at :
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bonkd-WoYv8vJwGT7bUSV2vXl4s5JgfJY4rzi1abKcA/edit?tab=t.0
UC Riverside: Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI • Artistic Program
ucrarts.ucr.edu/events/co-creativity-in-music-sound-and-ai-artistic-program/
audiovisualmusic.ucr.edu/co-creativity-book-of-concerts/
Concerts, Screenings, and Workshops
June 5 -7 • Culver Center of the Arts
Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI brings together composers, performers, researchers, media artists, and students to explore emerging forms of artistic practice shaped through interaction between humans and intelligent systems.
Across concerts, workshops, screenings, and discussions, the conference examines how artificial intelligence transforms improvisation, audiovisual creation, embodiment, listening, and collective creativity. The event reflects the interdisciplinary mission of the Experimental Acoustics Research Studio (EARS) and the launch of the EARS InterArts Lab at the Culver Center of the Arts.
By connecting artistic experimentation, research, pedagogy, and public engagement, the artistic program brings together internationally recognized artists and researchers from IRCAM, Stanford University, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and other institutions alongside student projects developed at UC Riverside. We warmly welcome all participants, artists, students, and audiences to this shared environment of listening, experimentation, and creative inquiry.
Friday, June 5, 2026
Concert 2: IRCAM / REACH Collective
8:00 – 9:20 PM
Reserve Free Tickets
Taideji (2024) – 15 min
Lara Morciano – composition, piano | José-Miguel Fernández – AI-Agents Somax2Collider, immersive electronics | Thierry Miroglio – percussion
A work exploring the dynamic relationship between acoustic instruments, electronics, and Somax2 through contrasts of density, resonance, and improvisational interaction.
Six Spaces / Resonant Bodies (2026) – 15 min
Mikhail Malt – composition, AI-Agents Somax2 generative electronics | Thierry Miroglio – percussion
A semi-improvised work for symphonic bass drum and generative electronics inspired by contemplative philosophy and ritual listening practices.
REACHing Jeff (2026) – 15 min
Jeff Albert – trombone | Anthony Cammarotta, Guitar, REACH collective – AI-Agents Somax2 generative electronics
An improvisational collaboration exploring co-creative interaction with Somax2.
Surprise du Chef (2026)
REACH collective and guests
A concluding set of spontaneous improvisations and collaborative interactions.
Saturday, June 6, 2026
Workshop 2: Somax2
4:30 – 7:00 PM
Hosted by the IRCAM REACH collective, this workshop introduces Somax2 as a system for improvisation and composition. Participants will explore interaction strategies, live demonstrations, and collaborative improvisation with AI-driven systems. (Space is limited)
Concert 3
8:00 – 9:20 PM
Somax2 Collective Improvisation
IRCAM REACH collective, workshop participants, and guest artists
The conference concludes with an open collective improvisation celebrating experimentation, listening, spontaneity, and co-creativity between human performers and AI systems.
About IRCAM REACH Collective and Somax2
The IRCAM REACH collective brings together artists and researchers exploring co-creativity between humans and intelligent systems through improvisation, composition, and live performance. Central to this work is Somax2, an AI-driven improvisation system that listens, reacts, and interacts with performers in real time. Developed at IRCAM, Somax2 functions as a co-creative musical partner capable of generating responsive musical behaviors while remaining deeply connected to live performers and musical corpora. The system has become an important platform for exploring new forms of human–AI collaboration in contemporary music.
