algorithmic practices in music and sound

Embedding Algorithms 2 brings together artists, musicians, and researchers whose work places algorithms at the core of sonic practice. Over two afternoons at UdK Medienhaus, talks and performances will look at how machine learning models, live-coded patterns, biological data, analogue artificial neurons, and feedback circuits become part of how we build instruments, compose, perform, and listen. Topics range from neural audio synthesis and embodied machine learning to neuromorphic computing, art made with living organisms and genetic data, and the politics of training data, alongside spatial sound on the NTSS, a 30-loudspeaker system housed at the Medienhaus.

The event follows the first Embedding Algorithms Workshop, held at Berlin Open Lab in 2024, and is organised by Federico Visi as part of the project Co-improvising with the Non-human, supported by the Musikfonds AI scholarship (STIP-5). It is kindly supported by the Medienhaus, InKüLe, and the Generative Art / Computational Art class at Universität der Künste Berlin.

Admission is free and open to all.
The event will be live-streamed.

If you would like to attend, please register here to receive further information and the livestream links for remote attendance. Streaming links will be sent on the days of the event. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdge50bUWQwy3mhDmKh3HbjvV6bJ_gSGpMLh7xjrGT2lRqtWw/viewform

Please register even if you plan to attend in person: it helps us estimate how many people to expect and organise the space accordingly.

23 October – Day 1 – live streaming: https://www.youtube.com/live/yG4K_2BGFJo?si=HMk0lL4VUNCYLtas

When/Where

23—24 October 2026
15:00—19:30
UdK Medienhaus
Aula (1st floor)
Grunewaldstraße 2-5,
10823 Berlin
U-Bahn Kleistpark
Info+registration:
www.federicovisi.com/emb-algo-2/

Participants

Adam Pultz
Alberto de Campo
Alex McLean (remote)
Andrea Parkins
Bruno Gola
Chris Kiefer (remote)
Eman Safavi
Federico Visi
Genoël von Lilienstern
Guilherme Coelho
Marcello Lussana
Marco Donnarumma (remote)
Margherita Pevere
Moisés Horta Valenzuela / Hexorcismos
Muyang Lyu
Nicola Leonard Hein
Society for Nontrivial Pursuits
Viola Yip

Schedule

All times are CEST and approximate.

Fri 23 Oct

Sat 24 Oct

Each presentation/performance runs about 15 minutes. Presenters are grouped into blocks of two or three. Instead of a Q&A after each talk, there is one shared Q&A at the end of each block. This is meant to encourage a conversation among the presenters and with the audience, so that ideas and questions can move across the different works rather than staying with one talk at a time.

Short summaries

Adam Pultz
Machine Temporalities: The aesthetics and politics of decelerated machine learning
Since the deep learning revolution in 2012, model size and compute power have followed an exponential growth curve, a feature echoed in the socio-political domain through the fascinating and disturbing project of accelerationism. In this talk I discuss how the artistic use of decelerated machine learning may trouble accelerationist ideology and present a way of speculatively imagining futures beyond technocapitalism.

Alex McLean (remote)
Non-scribal algorithmic music
Algorithmic music can feel like abstract, ‘paper rhythms’, which unlike instrumental music, can feel unrelatable to movements of the body. In this talk/performance I’ll share how learning some of the algorithmic patterns underlying traditional South Indian rhythms has grounded my live coding practice, and informed my development of technology around it. I will also reflect on the liveliness of ‘non-scribal’ music culture, and what live coding culture could learn from it.

Andrea Parkins
“The Stray”: Diffusing Dis-location with the NTSS
Andrea Parkins will present an excerpt from “The Stray (Variation 4)”, her electroacoustic composition through which she highlights and implicates correspondences (or ruptures) that take place between gesture, sound and space; and embodied tensions between attempt and fluency. Parkins’ composition draws on Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic writing on abjection and the sublime, evoking the subjectivity of a migratory, dislocated (and sounding) body: a “stray”. For “Embedding Algorithms 2” Parkins will work together with Alberto de Campo and Bruno Gola to diffuse her composition on the NTSS (a non-trivial sound system).

Bruno Gola
Neuromorphic Synthesis
Inspired by the work of David Tudor and Forrest Warthman and the field of Neuromorphic Computing, “Neuromorphic Synthesis” investigates the history and speculates on the future of computation and Artificial Intelligence by means of experimental music, looking at modular systems as a hybrid analog/digital computing system. A central piece of this ongoing artistic research project is the Memristor, an electronic component currently used in research for analog neural networks, overcoming the limitations of the von Neumann architecture. By exploring feedback matrices using Memristors for the weights, signal flow isn’t only affected by the circuits but it also alters the material and the behavior of the circuits themselves.

Bruno Gola, Alberto de Campo, S4NTP
NTSS – A Nontrivial Sound System
NTSS is a NonTrivial Sound System that understands spatialisation as a rich resource for improvised performances: it offers a diversity of loudspeaker sound colors; multiple input sources can be sent on spatial orbits defined by a variety of algorithms; the parameters of these orbits can be informed by machine listening; and it is polyphonic: multiple performers can play their layers of fully spatialised sound into the NTSS simultaneously.
It consists of 30 loudspeakers living at UdK Berlin Medienhaus. Speaker maps and panning algorithms can be adapted flexibly, which we did for a concert at Silent Green Kuppelhalle, and for a residency at Hosek Gallery Berlin. It is available as an open source SuperCollider library.

Chris Kiefer (remote)
MEMLNaut: a musical instrument for exploration of musically embodied machine learning
MEMLNaut is a musical instrument and research platform for exploration of musically embodied machine learning. It can process and generate sound and optimise and run machine learning models on its dual core microcontroller chip. MEMLNaut is part of an investigation into the musically expressive potential of machine learning (ML) when embodied within physical musical instruments. It proposes ‘tuneable ML’, a novel approach to exploring the musicality of ML models, when they can be adjusted, personalised and remade, using the instrument as the interface.

Eman Safavi
Watermarking the training data of generative audio models: forensic detectability or a matter of intellectual property
When artists’ audio recordings enter generative AI training datasets, questions of consent, attribution, traceability and control become entangled with model architecture as well as datasets used for the training and fine-tuning process. Previous studies have demonstrated successful watermarking, including model-integrated approaches such as DualMark. My thesis investigates a different possibility: can artists mark their recordings once and retain provenance without depending on AI developers? Experiments with AudioSeal and Stable Audio Open show that source-level watermarks disappear during representation learning. These findings reframe artist protection as a sociotechnical challenge involving architectural accountability, transparency, and enforceable data governance. The presentation will be a walkthrough of my experiments, prototypes, hypothesis and discussions.

Genoël von Lilienstern
AI as Just Another Tool? Continuities and Discontinuities in Computer-Assisted Composition
Drawing on a personal history of technological tools in composition, this talk examines the apparent discrepancy between the continuity of artistic practice and the perceived rupture introduced by artificial intelligence. From notation software and algorithmic composition environments to machine learning, these technologies have entered my work as extensions of an evolving compositional practice rather than as fundamental departures from it. Yet public expectations surrounding AI, often shaped by speculative and science-fiction narratives, suggest a very different understanding of its artistic implications. Through examples from my own work, I will explore how this discrepancy affects the reception of AI-based music and introduce the concept of the hyperimaginary as a framework for understanding the relationship between technological processes, artistic practice, and cultural imagination.

Federico Visi
Embedding algorithms in the electroacoustic feedback loop and co-improvising with the non-human
After a brief account of my project Co-improvising with the Non-human, I perform with the Sophtar, a feedback string instrument with an embedded computer. Somax2 agents from IRCAM and musically embodied machine learning (MEML) algorithms from the Emute Lab at the University of Sussex run inside the instrument, acting on its electroacoustic feedback loop and electromechanical actuators. Machine and human listen to the strings and act on them, sharing the same vibrating material, and improvise through a single physical system. The session closes with a first glimpse of the NHÉs, a swarm of non-human entities that emit and sense sound and light.

Guilherme Coelho
Towards Latent Synthesis: Prompting, Remixing and Blending with Text-to-Audio AI
This session explores particular approaches to working with text-to-audio AI systems such as Suno and Udio, with a focus on the creative potential of latent synthesis. Through incongruent intersemiotic prompt combinations, cross-materialism, and the remixing and blending of input audio, I show how these systems can be pushed beyond their conventional outputs towards idiosyncratic, emergent sound objects. We will listen to these strange hybrids and consider what sonic materialities, modes of synthesis and musical imaginaries they make possible.

Marcello Lussana
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Restorative Potential of Soundscapes
Evaluating the mental restoration potential of soundscapes is an active field of research, with solid findings but also open questions. While most research on restoration has focused on the visual aspects of environments, soundscape studies have also addressed this issue. However, there is no clear consensus on which auditory features play an important role.
This presentation outlines ongoing work on fine-tuning Stable Audio Open using pleasantness ratings to teach a machine to recognize pleasant soundscapes.

Marco Donnarumma (remote)
AI Prosthetics and Sonic Organs
In a world of social bubbles, immediate gratification and geopolitical upheaval, sound in art can help establish new ways of acknowledging the ‘other’, a first step towards a renewed mutuality. In this talk, Marco will focus on his latest series of works, I Am Your Body, an ongoing collection of performances and installation that leverage participative research to explore Deaf perception of sound as a means for new artistic aesthetics. Computational and prosthetic technology plays a crucial role in these works, but rather than being passive media, they are subverted and transformed into machines that act as new organs for a shared perception.

Margherita Pevere
Ode
Ode imagines urban ponds as spaceships undertaking a mission that, concealed by their apparent stillness, remains enigmatic to humans. Interconnected elements, inspired by the anatomy of pond organisms, shape a contemplative microcosmos. By combining bioinformatics with living samples from Berlin urban ponds, music, sculptural glass, garments, and sound objects, the artwork summons the liveliness of the spaceships. Pevere envisioned the spaceship concept during fieldwork with POUNDER researchers, who sample pond waters to extract genetic data of bacteria inhabiting them (also known as environmental DNA metabarcoding). Ode manifests actual genetic material and datasets from Berlin ponds as a multidimensional repository of ecological relationships and (im)possible adaptations to contaminants.

Moisés Horta Valenzuela / Hexorcismos
Building Unheard Music Instruments: Design Methodologies for Independent AI Music R&D
This performance lecture examines how SEMILLA.AI Studio bridges machine learning research and electronic music practice. Unpacking the end-to-end engineering of real-time neural audio instruments, we detail dataset curation, custom model training, and mapping latent spaces for live performance environments. The session demonstrates how independent computer musicians construct sovereign sonic architectures, concluding with a performance using SEMILLA.AI v2, NEBULA and in-development instruments.

Muyang Lyu
A Media Archaeology of Primitive Analog Neurons
A synthesizer prototype on breadboards, whose circuit is inspired by early artificial neurons in analog perceptrons and by LIF neuromorphic computing based on OTAs and Op Amps. Rather than conforming to conventional categories of musical instruments, the aim is to reflect on the historical epistemology embedded in technology, to question the choice of artistic apparatus between professional ready-made and amateur DIY approach, and to explore a messy but playful reuse and misuse of obsolete techniques from a super-low level.

Viola Yip and Nicola Leonard Hein
FO2: A Wearable Optoelectronic Laser-Feedback Instrument – Performing body-space-technology entanglements
In “Fluid Ontologies”, Transsonic (Nicola Leonard Hein and Viola Yip) continues to expand their intermedial artistic practice in performances. For this work, they further develop their DMI “FO2”. It is an optoelectronic laser-feedback instrument that uses laser modules as sound sources and a solar panel as a microphone, creating audiovisual feedback loops that generate images and sound using the same optoelectronic mechanism. Fluid Ontologies explores and defines new concepts of the instrumentality of light in audio circuits, putting space, body, technology, and instruments into one dynamic feedback system, exploring forms of cybernetic and transmedial modes of listening, as well as the emerging dances of agency.

What’s going on in the video:

The Sophtar is a feedback instrument, there is a transducer inside the head sound box. Somax2 – a multiagent system for human-machine co-improvisation – runs on the embedded computer responds to the human player by evoking structures of the musical data it is trained on. It tunes the bandpass filters in the electroacoustic feedback loop in response to how the bottom three strings are played. The model responds with pitches and onsets following a local stylistic knowledge space. These output pitches are mapped to 12 harmonics, and onsets are used to activate the solenoids and trigger amplitude envelopes that shape the electroacoustic feedback of the top five strings. The result is an encounter between the human player and the ghostly traces of the musics that formed the training dataset. The strings effectively become a place of contact between human, machine players, and the musical knowledge they encode. 

I have chosen to collaborate with the REACH group at IRCAM because their work is currently at the forefront of the research on using algorithms for human-machine co-creativity. REACH is a research project funded by the European Research Council and led by Gérard Assayag, and IRCAM is one of the leading music and technology research centres in the world. Their research work aims at understanding, modeling, and developing musical co-creativity between humans and machines through improvised interactions. Researchers at REACH study shared musicianship occurring at the intersection of the physical and digital spheres and have produced models and tools as vehicles to better understand human creativity in a context where it becomes more and more intertwined with computation. 

The residency period was very productive. I had access to IRCAM’s Studio 6 for several days, I successfully embedded Somax2 in the Sophtar and refined the algorithm that filters strings harmonics in the feedback loop in order to make Somax2 interact with it more expressively. At the end of the two weeks, I had the opportunity to perform and present my work to other researchers and composers at IRCAM. The session lead to very interesting exchanges with other musicians and researchers, including a hands-on session with Alois Cerbu shortly after to experiment with a frequency-domain saturator in the Sophtar feedback loop. 

I already made use of the results of the residency in a recent performance with Ensemble KNM in Berlin (more info here: The Nine Lives of Zosimos  – Ensemble KNM Berlin) and will use the system also in an upcoming performance at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in London. I will play on Thursday 25 June at 19:00 at Rich Mix in Shoreditch. I think the line up of the evening is really cool, and the programme of the whole conference also looks very promising.

Grateful to Gérard Assayag, Marco Fiorini (who also kindly took some of the photos in this post), and Vasiliki Zachari for hosting me at IRCAM. Big thanks to Musikfonds and Culture Moves Europe for supporting my residency. 

Read more:

• Project: Co-Improvising with the Non-human
• Previously: Residency at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour

I am particularly interested in how groups of non-human beings find ways to organise and dynamically adapt to unforeseen circumstances. What emerges from such group behaviours is more than the sum of its parts: seemingly simple individual strategies become beautifully complex, as swarm dynamics come into play. I find this inspiring in the context of musical co-improvisation, where the interplay between musicians may also result in something difficult to predict that is more than the sum of its parts. 

During my stay in Konstanz I learnt more about how fireflies synchronise, how bats use ultrasound for echolocation, the vocal repertoire of meerkats and the meaning of their many calls, how bees use sound to inform others in the hive of potential dangers, how locusts change their behavioural patterns when they join a swarm, and more. 

The research environment at CASCB is very interdisciplinary by design. Biologists, ethologists, neuroscientists, roboticists, and computer scientists often sit in the same room contributing to the same project. Coffee breaks become opportunities for very interesting casual conversations, where one can learn more about things they didn’t even know they were interested in. 

I presented my work in a seminar, part of a series organised by Andreagiovanni Reina, the Principal Investigator of the Group Intelligence and self-Organisation Lab (GIO Lab). The turn out and interest surprised me, particularly given that I come from other research domains. The questions and conversations that followed were also very stimulating. A few days later I performed with the Sophtar at a Friday evening social event at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and that was a lot of fun. 

I visited many laboratories during my stay, and was impressed by the variety and scale of the experiments going on at CASCB. I saw virtual reality rigs for insects, groups of robots using echolocation inspired by bats, tools capable of capturing the physiological signals of bees and microscopic fish, among other things. I even had the chance to go on a mountain hike as well as on a “bat walk.” That is an evening walk in the forest with bat detectors, devices that capture the ultrasonic calls of bats and transpose them to a frequency range that humans can hear in real time. 

I am very grateful to Andreagiovanni Reina for hosting me in his group and introducing me to many of the people working at CASCB. I am also very grateful to all the researchers I met during my stay who very generously took the time to show me their work and answer my questions. 

The next residency of the project will take place at IRCAM, where I’ll work with the REACH team at the STMS Lab to embed Somax2—an AI-based multi-agent system for human–machine co-improvisation—into the Sophtar.

• LLM Behavior Generator that transforms textual prompts into expressive sound modulations and motions in space.
• Chain of thoughts involving a “recipe” LLM cascading into a “code” LLM.
• Max for Live implementation for artistic use in Ableton Live with immersive audio systems such as 4D SOUND.
• Artistic experimentations and user feedbacks suggests such LLM-based system should be contextualized in the history of sound practices employing aleatoric, emergent, and open-ended strategies.

Here are the title and abstract:

Large Language Models to generate sonic behaviors: the case of Wilding AI in exploring creative co-agency

Large Language Models (LLMs) and foundational models play a central role in multimodal text-to-sound systems, such as text-to-speech and text-to-music, as well as in recent musical agent systems designed to automate music production tasks. We explore an alternative approach that employs LLM-based sonic agents as spatial composition techniques. This method, emerging from the Wilding AI research-creation project, integrates LLMs into Max/MSP, Ableton Live, and spatial sound environments. LLMs are used to generate step-by-step sequences controlling spatial audio parameters, including sound motion in 3D space and other assignable sound properties.
This paper details the artistic framework of Wilding AI, a LLM behavior generator, a live performance at the CTM Festival 2025, and discussions on composition, improvisation, time, and agency. Our work repositions LLMs as tools for shaping sonic experiences rather than merely generating finished audio material.

Here is the full paper: https://zenodo.org/records/16946605

This is one outcome of the collective research-creation lab Wilding AI.

The event took place in July 2024 at Universität der Künste Berlin, we brought together a community of artists, researchers, and practitioners and had a great time discussing the practice of embedding algorithms in the arts with presentations, exhibitions, and performances. Enjoy!

Full playlist:

There we report on our work on an instrument that translates the electrical activity produced by muscles into synthesised sound. The article also describes our collaboration with the Chicks on Speed on the performance piece Noise Bodies (2019), which was part of the Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann exhibition at Muzeum Susch.

I co-authored the article with Atau Tanaka, Balandino Di Donato, Martin Klang, and Michael Zbyszyński, here is the abstract:

This article presents a custom system combining hardware and software that senses physiological signals of the performer’s body resulting from muscle contraction and translates them to computer-synthesized sound. Our goal was to build upon the history of research in the field to develop a complete, integrated system that could be used by nonspecialist musicians. We describe the Embodied AudioVisual Interaction Electromyogram, an end-to-end system spanning wearable sensing on the musician’s body, custom microcontroller-based biosignal acquisition hardware, machine learning–based gesture-to-sound mapping middleware, and software-based granular synthesis sound output. A novel hardware design digitizes the electromyogram signals from the muscle with minimal analog preprocessing and treats it in an audio signal-processing chain as a class-compliant audio and wireless MIDI interface. The mapping layer implements an interactive machine learning workflow in a reinforcement learning configuration and can map gesture features to auditory metadata in a multidimensional information space. The system adapts existing machine learning and synthesis modules to work with the hardware, resulting in an integrated, end-to-end system. We explore its potential as a digital musical instrument through a series of public presentations and concert performances by a range of musical practitioners.

The idea of a journal edited issue came after the Embedding Algorithms Workshop that took place at the Berlin Open Lab in July 2024.

Feel free to share this call with others who might be interested in contributing.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Call for Submissions – Volume 31, Number 2
Issue thematic title: Embedding Algorithms in Music and Sound Art
Date of Publication: August 2026
Publishers: Cambridge University Press
Issue co-ordinators: Federico Visi (mail@federicovisi.com), Thor Magnusson (thormagnusson@hi.is)
Deadline for submission: 15 September 2025

Embedding Algorithms in Music and Sound Art
Embedding algorithms into physical objects has long been part of sound art and electroacoustic music practice, with sound artists and researchers creating tools and instruments that incorporate some algorithmic process that is central to their function or behaviour. Such practice has evolved profoundly over the years, touching many aspects of sound generation, electroacoustic composition, and music performance.

Whilst closely linked to technology, the practice of embedding algorithms into tools for sound making also transcends it. Different forms and concepts emerge in domains that can be analogue, digital, pertaining to recent or ancient technologies, tailored around the practice of a single individual or encompassing the behaviours of multiple players, even non-human ones.

The processes and rules that can be inscribed into instruments may include assumptions about sound and music, influencing how these are understood, conceptualised, and created. Algorithms can encode complex behaviours that may make the instrument adapt to the way it is being played or give it a degree of autonomy and agency. These aspects can have profound effects on the aesthetics and creative processes of sound art and electroacoustic music, as artists are given the possibility of delegating some of the decisions to their tools.

In the practice of embedding algorithms, knowledge and technology from other disciplines are appropriated and repurposed by sound artists in many ways. Sensors and algorithms developed in other research fields are used for making instruments. Similarly, digital data describing various phenomena – from environmental processes to the global economy – have been harnessed by practitioners for defining the behaviour of their sound tools, resulting in data-driven sound practices such as sonification.

More recently, advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible to embed machine learning models into instruments, introducing new aesthetics and practices in which curating a dataset and training a model are part of the artistic process. These trends in music and sound art have sparked a broad discourse addressing notions of agency, autonomy, authenticity, authorship, creativity and originality. There are aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical implications arising from the practice of building sound-making instruments that incorporate algorithmic processes. How do intelligent instruments affect our musical practice?

This demands an interdisciplinary critical enquiry. For this special issue of Organised Sound we seek articles that address the aesthetic and cultural implications that designing and embedding algorithms has on electroacoustic music practice and sound art. We are interested in the role of this new technological context on musical practice.

Please note that we do not seek submissions that describe a project or a composition without a broad contextualisation and an underlying central question. We instead welcome submissions that aim at addressing one or more specific issues of relevance to the call and to the journal’s readership which may include works or projects as examples.

Topics of interest include:

• Aesthetics in performance of instruments with embedded algorithms
• Phenomenology of electroacoustic performance with algorithmic instruments
• Agency, autonomy, intentionality, and “otherness” of algorithmic instruments
• Co-creation and authorship in creative processes involving humans and algorithmic instruments
• Dynamics of feedback, adaptivity, resistance, and entanglement in player-instrument-algorithm assemblages
• Human-machine electroacoustic improvisation
• Critical reflections on the role of algorithms in the creation of sound tools and instruments and their impact on electroacoustic music practice
• Meaning making, symbolic representations, and assumptions on music and sound embedded within instruments and sound tools
• Knowledge through instruments: epistemic and hermeneutic relations in algorithmic instruments
• Appropriation, repurposing, and “de-scripting” of hardware, algorithms, and data by sound artists
• Exploration of individual and collective memory through algorithmic instrumental sound practice
• Roles and understandings of the machine learning model as a tool in instrumental music practice
• Use of algorithmic instruments in contexts informed by historical and/or non-Western traditions
• Ethics, sociopolitics, and ideology in the design of algorithmic tools for electroacoustic music
• Legibility and negotiability of algorithmic processes in electroacoustic music practice
• Non-digital approaches: embedding algorithms in non-digital instruments
• Postdigital and speculative approaches in electroacoustic music practice with algorithmic instruments
• Data as instrument in electroacoustic music practice: curating and embedding data into instruments
• Aesthetics and idiosyncrasies of networked, site-specific, and distributed instruments and performance environments
• Entanglement, inter-subjectivity, and relational posthumanist paradigms in designing and composing with algorithmic instruments
• More-than-human, inter-species, and ecological approaches in algorithmic instrumental practice

Furthermore, as always, submissions unrelated to the theme but relevant to the journal’s areas of focus are always welcome.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 September 2025

SUBMISSION FORMAT:
Notes for Contributors including how to submit on Scholar One and further details can be obtained from the inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or at the following url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/organised-sound/information/author-instructions/preparing-your-materials.

General queries should be sent to: os@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editors.

Accepted articles will be published online via FirstView after copy editing prior to the full issue’s publication.

Editor: Leigh Landy; Associate Editor: James Andean

Founding Editors: Ross Kirk, Tony Myatt and Richard Orton†

Regional Editors: Liu Yen-Ling (Annie), Dugal McKinnon, Raúl Minsburg, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Schedel, Barry Truax

International Editorial Board: Miriam Akkermann, Marc Battier, Manuella Blackburn, Brian Bridges, Alessandro Cipriani, Ricardo Dal Farra, Simon Emmerson, Kenneth Fields, Rajmil Fischman, Kerry Hagan, Eduardo Miranda, Garth Paine, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Teruggi, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse

I built the Sophtar in collaboration with Sukandar Kartadinata. I presented and performed with it at NIME 2024, here is the paper from the conference proceedings.

At IIL I am working on extending the Sophtar with actuators and machine learning models to make it respond to my playing in ways that are not easy to predict yet meaningful and inspiring. In particular, I am working on:

• an extension that allows the instrument to self-play by means of solenoids,
• embedding notochord models,
• per-string filtering for harmonic feedback.

I see the research and development work on the Sophtar as a way to probe and engage with broader research questions on musical improvisation and co-creativity with machines and algorithms.

I will present the Sophtar at an Open Lab on Friday, 27th September, 15:00-17:00.

EDIT: here is a video of the performance at the 2025 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, Georgia Tech Ferst Center For The Arts, 8 March 2025.

Jeff Albert: trombone;
Sukandar Kartadinata & Federico Visi: Sophtar

The Sophtar has been developed with the support of the GEMM))) research cluster at Luleå University of Technology, the Intelligent Instruments Lab at University of Iceland, the European Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, the Boström Fund, and the Helge Ax:son Johnsons foundation.