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 series of sonic-gustatory experiences, of experimental electroacoustic ASMR video performances. The combination of a seemingly mundane cooking performance interacting with an autonomous music algorithm of a complex feedback network. A celebration of the mundane, a festival of insignificance contrasted by the meticulous video production of a complex-sounding sound-art performance.
A short-circuit of the gustatory experience with the acousmatic experience: the auditory is feeding the gustatory while the latter is listening back.
The composer is performing a supposedly instructional video of cooking an omelette or a pizza. A set of microphones are set up to listen very closely and to record every micro-movement of his performance. From preparing the ingredients, kneading the dough or hitting eggs, to cutting vegetables and herbs or tasting the resulting meal – all sounds of the cooking process are fed in real-time into a naively intelligent autonomous algorithm, which sonically analyses and reinterprets every sound to a new extended sonic reality. The performer’s movements tend to be gently slow, meditative, while the interactive sound results as a complex reflection. Every sound and gesture is interconnected into a complete sonic-gustatory performance, tickling and teasing those senses of the auditor. While spectator-listener can comfortably sit back, observe and listen to the evolution of the sonic-nutritional process while letting it influence her autonomous sensory response.
The overall project includes the following three volumes:
How to make an omelette – with interactive sound: a four minute performance, posted in 3 parts over three weeks focusing on the audience of Instagram
2. How to make a pizza – with interactive sound: An one-hour video performance commissioned and presented as an online premiere-event for Ensemble Ipse, New York. Part 2 develops the idea and explores the experience in its extensive form, having a more detailed composition process over one hour duration.
3. Re-pizzing: the third part goes back to short form videos mainly intended for Instagram audience. Every small video is a remix in terms of music and editing, creating a new sensory-packed compressed in terms of visuals and sound series of experiences. Experimenting more with parallel music layering remixing combinations.
The combination of the seemingly mundane cooking performance is interacting with a complex sonic feedback network, the autonomously driven music algorithm Ephemeron. An eco-systemic installation, through its sonic process creating a dynamic living environment for the performer-listener. Sound processes are created solely by the sounds in space, all connected to a single sonic entity surrounding the performer-listener, creating a sonic ecosystem including autonomous sonic entities of constant interactions. As a sound result, the work emerges from the interactions among space, software and performer-listener as an ever-changing living algorithmic ecosystem. The live ecosystem results from a live algorithm with the ability to ‘listen’ through the microphones and ‘express’ itself through the loudspeakers. The work through this software is able to organise its structure; it is able to self-organise and adapt in space.
Inspiration comes from the internet trend of cooking videos mainly used to entertain through the sharing and connecting with an audience with gustatory experience. At the same time there is a rapport with the interestingly peculiar trend of ASMR internet performances, which aim to sympathetically tune to the sensory phenomenon triggered mainly by sound.
Treating the theme of insignificance from its futility to the appreciation of the beauty of things as they are. A silent challenge of closely observing micromovements, listening closely to the surrounding microsounds, and distorting them through the power of an artificial imagination-like sonic mirror.
Credits Concept Music Composition | Algorithmic Development | Performance | Direction &Video Editing: Phivos-Angelos 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?
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-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.
Project FantaVentura is an interactive, psychedelic music VR experience created for the German band ‘Die Fantastischen Vier’. The VR experience uses Leap Motion hand-tracking, interactive sound, volumetric video, animation, 360 film, to tell a story that is as much about time and aging, relationships, trust and loyalty as it is about members of the band dropping acid on a tropical beach 25 years ago, and changing the way they saw the world.
Music FantaVentura was the result of another creative collaboration with Mike Robbins in a Virtual Reality project. I focused in reinterpreting interactively existing music, reorganising it in a completely new VR experience. The challenge was the creative constrain of using sound elements inspired by the specific piece of music, trying to stay as close to the original. In some cases, literally by using sounds coming directly from the composition or in other by using sound processes and reusing them in an interactive manner, or in others by sounds inspired by the original piece. The creative sound creation in a psychedelic inspired setting was a creative playground:
The sound of a closing door with the echo of a snare.
The sound of frantic string orchestra produced by flying seahorses
Iconic synth sound used for the beam produced by the user
The sound of soap bubble popping while planets were casually exploded by the user
Another part of the work, was the use of ambisonic sound for the 360 videos. The attempt was to keep the voice In a simple manner, but at the same time, enhance the sounds in a surrounding environment using some contemporary technics of perception in spatialisation. This part of the job was rather technical in order to keep clarity in the voice while being creative add some new elements.
A 6DOF version for HTC Vive is available for download on Steam and a 360 version can be seen on the Telekom Magenta app.
Exhibitions: September 2019 – IFA, Berlin, Germany September 2019 – IAA, Frankfurt, Germany January – August 2020 – Stadtpalais Museum für Stuttgart, Germany
Cancelled due to COVID-19: March 2020 – CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark May 2020 – FMX, Stuttgart, Germany June 2020 – VRHAM!, Hamburg, Germany
Fish swimming casually at the beach while looked by an eye inside a hovering bubbleProject team with the Fanta4 band members in the presentation at IFA exhibition, Berlin
