The project remixes videos using generative AI algorithms, in order to reflect, to suggest, to imagine, contributing to the new debate on the disruptive effects of AI.
AI music generators have passed the threshold of “convincing”, and it’s time for music to deal with existential anxiety — as the visual arts have had to mentally process the last two years.
As a music creator, I have been processing the new reality we live in — i.e. omnipresent Generative AI — while imagining ways to creatively incorporate this disruptive demon, which may suggest new ways of experiencing, new ways of interpreting the human condition, new ways of perceiving the world, new ways of negotiating with daily reality.
Ephemeron is a music living organism. During each concert, the work is born, evolves, and dies at the end of the performance. The performance space, including the audience, is the “natural environment” of this music organism. This music organism is fed from the sound of its environment through microphones while it feeds back the environment with sound through the speakers. Music organism and the environment are an interconnected and inseparable ecosystem.
There is no pre-recorded material at any stage. The work emerges as a music organism from the interactions among space algorithm and (if any) user-performer. In the original version, the initial material of the composition is the applause coming from the previous piece.
The Recording
The recording is a fixed acousmatic version based on the material of Ephemeron. It uses material from two organisms in different environments and audiences’ reactions (the De Montfort University, U.K. concert hall and the Kubus of Z.K.M., Germany). The material of these live organisms was taken from particular spatio-temporal situations to construct transferable realities in time and space.
Now, there is no live organism any more. Here, you are in this place, observing the history of another reality. You are experiencing the construction of a new reality surrounding you, the reality of your actual perception.
The recording can be considered a ‘photograph’ of the music organism that existed under particular circumstances. The recording provided is a stereo mix of the original version.
Ephemeron was commissioned by the Z.K.M. institution and saxophonist Pedro Bittencourt. Originally, it was conceived as a real-time electronics “concert work”.
It was initially developed in the concert hall of Z.K.M. Karlsruhe and the Maison de Science de l’Homme/Univerité de Paris 8. It premiered at Z.K.M. Kubus Concert Hall.
Ephemeron has been presented as a concert piece or installation numerous times worldwide. The algorithm has become an ecosystemic music instrument, the backbone of several projects of Kollias.
Project The project of Hanna Haaslahti Captured is a participatory installation, which captures your face and creates a new identity for you in a collective scenario taking place in virtual world.
Captured enables people to step into virtual world as a digital double, making them actors and spectators in the same time. The doubles take different roles in a narrative simulation modeling unpredictable moods of human crowd behavior.
Which role will you take on? The bully, the target or the bystander? And what does it say about your primal instincts in watching aggressive social behaviour?
Music The music expresses interactively the actions of the captured Avatars. The piano is the central ingredient of the orchestration, used in its conventional way, but also by recording of sympathetic resonances.
Each avatar carries around her own piano resonance, while in the peaceful walking state. Each resonance is follows its avatar while collectively composes a wall of sound made out an interwoven network of small. When violence starts, each action is depicted by the frantic gestures of a small music ensemble: piano clusters, drum rolls, cymbal hits, bass drum kicks. Music gestures and avatars gestures are directly interconnected as one gesture.
Project Place is a VR experience that revives the Great Synagogue of Aleppo through digital walls and memories.
Since the end of 2022, Place is exhibited in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
The prototypes of the project have been shown at the film festivals DOK Leipzig and Docaviv .
Sound As the project is trying to recreate the experience of the Synagogue, like a archeological reconstruction with the senses, also the sound follows the same path.
Thus the approach within the VR experience and the videos, was mainly to recreate the feeling of being back then and there.
I used several archived sounds mixed with contemporary recordings to travel the listener back to the environment of Alepo.
Created in collaboration with High Road Stories productions: Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen
Project A music Virtual Reality installation, inspired by the images and sounds of the ever-changing night sky.
Music In this VR project, I created an interactive music ‘score’ using electro-acoustic music tools and coding in MaxMSP. The main idea comes from different forms of mapping, from the ‘mapping’ explanations we attempt to perform in order to explain Nature, to understand and appreciate music, or a movement that becomes sound.
In Proper Motion, sound and vision interconnect as a unified whole. Our actions are equally apparent visually and sonically. A human gesture becomes a musical gesture. But what are we interacting with? What are we hearing?
Following the premise that everything becomes something else at some time, and mirroring the same approach with that of the visuals, we have started with musical found objects which are reformed, remapped, recomposed into something completely new, while incorporating seeds of their origins.
We reverse-engineer original scientific processes used in mapping electromagnetic spectra to audible sound frequencies: the sun’s fluctuating radiation, the pulse of the earth passing through a meteor shower, a chorus of atmospheric disturbances released at daybreak.
The motion capture of a dancer, recorded somewhere else in space and time, is likewise a mapping, in this case, of physical movement into a set of points floating in a digital space.
A decades-old, archaic electronic music composition used electricity run through wires and circuits to map musical thought onto plastic discs we call records.
In itself data is devoid of meaning and emotion, beyond the simple fact it exists, and it reveals patterns. But what happens when they start to be mapped to one another: the billion year-old light of a star talks to a sixty year old piece of electronic music that causes a women’s hand gesture, originally made years ago, to move in a completely different way?
“Can you imagine a sound inside you head?” video of the perception-music-game “Experientia” Come along and play with your senses!
Music & text: Phivos-Angelos Kollias Conducted by Maxime Pascal Narrator-Communicator Damien Bigourdan
for 10 musicians, communicator and the active perception premièred by Le Balcon ensemble, Church of Saint-Merri, Paris
Project Experientia is as a chamber music theatre work, a musical game with the auditor’s awareness.
The voice is interacting with the audience’s perception, introducing every auditor individually inside his own uniquely personal experience. This is done by playing a game with the auditor, a game that suggests the main idea of the piece. As the voice sais: “The game is simple: I give you a sound and you create your meaning. Or I give you a word and you will create your sound.” Asking the auditor to close his eyes, providing him with a purely ‘acousmatic’ experience while leading the processes of the experience.
Playing with the idea that every auditor addresses his proper meanings, his own symbols, his personal representation of the work’s experience. We play with the idea of the work as a ‘self-referential experience’ – a labyrinth, which will include the content of the auditor’s mind. A construction in which the composer will guide the auditor towards the characteristics of his choice, while the auditor will choose the course of his journey.
program notes The fields of experience are vast and their limits reach to infinity. You have already walked your own road inside these fields. You have curved this road with your own steps. You may have walked though prosperous valleys …crossed wild rivers …been lost in dark forests …or flourishing gardens. And now you arrive in front of this building. A building you are about to enter. You may open the front door and just stay at the entrance hall, leave everything untouched, just walk back. But you may dare to get deeper inside the building, look around, search below the old wooden furniture, go down at the basement, move up at the attic, explore through forgotten dusty boxes. And after looking and searching, you may find something exceptional for you, something hidden behind an ancient mirror. I have conceived this building for you. And you are about to experience it.
Inspiration Considering the piece as a big construction of interacting ideas, the inspirations are many and this creation is the emerging result of their interactions. On the first corner there is the philosophical tendency of constructivism, advocating that everyone creates his own reality by interacting with the ‘common’ reality. On the second corner, there is the communicational element of Milton Erickson and neuro-linguistic programming, a model of human experience made by linguistic theories, systems theories and different psychological techniques. On a third corner there is Xenakis’ hypothesis of second order sonorities, that if we consider sound, as we consider light, made of numerous small chunks, then from a number of given sonorities we can create new emerging sonorities — like from the collection of small dots of simple colours a complex pointillist painting emerges. On a fourth corner there is magic artistry, and in particular Derren Brown; the direct connection a magician has with his audience, how he creates a whole unique experience although everyone knows that it is just a trick. And of course last but not list, in the final corner there is ‘playing’, the never-ending lust to play and acquire new experiences through a game. Credits: Musicians: Julie Brunet-Jailly, flute Romy Bischoff, clarinet Julien Abbes, bassoon Benjamin Locher, French horn Pierre Maestra, Joseph Birnbaum, violins Aurélie Deschamps, viola Askar Ishangaliyev, cello Alain Muller, piano Benoît Bourlet, percussion
cameras: Victoria Donnet, Stefano Forlini video editing: Stefano Forlini, Phivos-Angelos Kollias technical direction: Florent Derex electronic music realisation: Augustin Muller sound technician: Baptiste Chouquet musical script: Pedro Garcia-Velasquez, Aurélie Martin general management: Baptiste Joxe lights: Damien Valade stage and light management: Angélique Baert costumes: Pascale Lavandier
Composed by Phivos-Angelos Kollias Performed by Pedro Bittencourt Dedicated to Charles Mingus Enlarge your Sax project, Z.K.M., 2010
3rd prize of the G.E.R.M.I. International Composition Competition, Rome, 2009.
The work has been performed 10 times in several different countries mainly by Pedro Bittencourt (China, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Cuba, Germany, France, Lithuania).
Program Notes A self-organising electronic system gives birth to a music organism, in communication with the saxophonist’s detailed score. During the concert, the music organism will be born, will be developed and will then die. The emerging organism is a unique sound result, as all sounds and all sound processing derive from the present space and time.
A Symphony of Noise is a music VR experience, letting the user experience a fantastic world made and governed by sound.
Immerse yourself into a sensational symphony of everyday sounds, which are lifted into the unusual through mixing, superimposition and modulation.
Loosely based on Matthew Herbert’s book “The Music”, A Symphony of Noise aims to inspire users to think about the way they understand music. The complete soundscape of the application refrains from the usage of musical instruments and instead works with familiar and common everyday noises. These are complemented with the user’s voice or other auditory input in order to create an individual and personal experience.
The user embarks on a journey through inner and outer dimensions of the human being – starting with the first heartbeat, he gradually moves into the world of nature, the man-made, and the supernatural. Visual hints invite the viewer to participate: Conscious breathing, talking, singing, and hand movements are all different interactions triggering something special in the digital worlds and leaving a personal auditory fingerprint.
Project A music work, accompanied with a video editing made out of footage of twitter users, created as a spontaneous reaction against Police Brutality in Greece. A result of thoughts and feelings against the tragic incidents happening in the streets of Greece, where democracy and freedom is daily sacrificed in the name of order and security.
“When a human body sends its own antibodies to attack healthy cells, we are talking about symptoms of cancer. When a human society sends its own defense mechanisms to attack peaceful civilians, we are talking about symptoms of police violence.”
This is part of the music dialogue against police brutality, started and encouraged by fellow musicians Andreas Polyzogopoulos and Spyros Polychronopoulos that ended up creating a collective music album along with 34 other musicians: “PONAO – 37 composers against police brutality”
The album is released on Bandcamp available for free with voluntary contributing to support the victims of police brutality:
Project A music-rhythm game, a celebration of electronic music. The player is playing along the music, controlling a tribe of dancing robots with the objective to revitalise the earth with renewable energy.
A mad professor’s robot lab made out of music machines of the era in question, machines that give energy to this robot with the rhythm of the music.
