Project A non-violent stealth video game, where a young boy tries to escape and find his mother. A tribute to Sergio Leone’s westerns and the music of Ennio Morricone.
Music The music for the multi-awarded video game “El Hijo” is an interactive orchestral score, dynamically changing throughout the game. Thematically, the score engages in a musical dialogue with Ennio Morricone’s iconic work on Spaghetti Westerns, to whom the music is dedicated. It revisits the Wild West settings of the Spaghetti Western genre in a non-violent context.
The music interactively leverages the player’s movements within the game to influence the symphonic orchestration. As the central game character, El Hijo, moves around various environments such as a dark monastery, a dusty desert, or a bustling town, different aspects of the orchestration are revealed, thus embodying the diversity of the journey experienced by the young boy.
Space not only unfolds the narrative journey of the main character, El Hijo, but also expands the orchestral composition: a dynamic orchestration in space, guided by the user’s journey as El Hijo. A turn at a corner might reveal an angry monk, underscored by a slide guitar; a threatening cowboy approaching, accompanied by a crescendo from a string trio. An ostinato from the timpani and the double bass punctuate the overwhelming ride on a cart, while moving in the darkness is met with the sonorous tones of low brass instruments.
This composition represents the culmination of my previous musical research into the expressive nature of physical space, exploring how space can play an active creative role equal to other musical dimensions, such as melody and harmony. I designed the musical interactions specifically for this game and they were implemented by programmer Stephan Schüritz.
3rd prize at Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition 2025
PROGRAM NOTES
Everything you hear in this piece tonight is not real. Here’s a sonic kaleidoscope unfolds before your ears, made of synthetic reflections. Sound after sound is extracted from the human collective memory. Composed entirely of generative AI fragments—hundreds of them—this piece uses an algorithm that has hoovered up the music of every artist ever recorded, non-consensually incorporating it into an artificially constructed representation of collective memory. Feeding this algorithm with fragments of my own music spits out a conjured stream of sound drawn from the codified collective mind.
But do not be fooled.
This is not Music.
This is Fake.
ADDITIONAL INFO
AI-Generated Fragments as Synthetic Reflections of Collective Memory
“Fake” (2024) is a multi-channel electroacoustic non-music piece created entirely using AI-generated fragments. By feeding a generative AI algorithm segments of the composer’s electroacoustic composition “Cosmodemonia” (2022) the work explores artificial intelligence as a vessel for representing collective memory.
The resulting composition presents a sonic kaleidoscope of synthetic reflections extracted from human collective memory, questioning notions of musical authenticity.
The compositional methodology combines generation, collection and organization of AI-generated fragments and their spatial distribution.
The work reexamines the concept of what is “real” in music; it is an acousmatic narrative in which each element may be a fragment of the past or a simulacrum of the present.
The listener is invited to navigate—through perception—a constructed sonic kaleidoscope of synthetic reflections drawn from the human collective memory, composed entirely of over 300 generative AI fragments. All of them generative reflections on the composer’s work, ‘Cosmodemonia’.
Whether or not it qualifies as music, it is a reflective commentary on the deep learning representation of collective memory, and the act of attributing musical meaning to organised sound.
Spatial counterpoint is developed through spatialization of the generative layers. The structure creates multiple, simultaneous spatial trajectories—each representing a discrete fragment of collective memory, a distinct presence in the overall soundscape.
A sonic battle of ideas unfolds between structured, stable sections and bursts of chaotic energy—emerging from interconnected chains of thought within the latent space of AI memories—a reimagining of traditional counterpoint in a multidimensional synthetic sonic space. Spatial choreography guides, misdirects and then redirects the listener’s attention—up, down, across.
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.
