Chihiro Ono visited the RNCM Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music (PRiSM) earlier this week to meet the team and facilities she’ll be collaborating with as part of her upcoming commission, premiering at Associate Composer Simon Knighton’s curated Nonclassical event in September.
Chihiro will work closely with Dr Christopher Melen (RNCM PRiSM Research Software Engineer) to explore how AI can relate to dynamical systems, particularly chaos and randomness. This will involve them working with PRiSM SampleRNN – PRiSM's flagship AI software tool, using a dataset of Japanese folk melodies, field recordings of nature, villages and cities, and various violin techniques.
Chihiro Ono with the Lovelace Engine at the PRiSM Lab in RNCM, 28 April 2022
Simon and Chihiro tell us:
“The project is about making and discovering music which relates to dynamical systems (and associated concepts like chaos theory, periodicity/non-linearity, determinism, emergent behaviour etc) in interesting ways. Some pieces may be poetically inspired by these concepts, or they may have certain musical features which may be directly analogous – or indeed in some cases they may be actual physical dynamical systems in and of themselves.
We want to see how AI effectively looks for patterns in music to replicate, yet how it may not ‘latch on’ to the same patterns that humans do. ‘Noise in the system’ can become the focal point, very much like the chaotic behaviour of indeterministic dynamical systems, so this will be an interesting thing to think about as the project unfolds.”
We headed back to the newly refurbished St John’s Waterloo for Associate Composer Simon Knighton’s curated event, Dynamical Systems and Natural Environments.