SYNTHETIC MIXTAPE #02 - LAB#03 OST

Claude Speeed’s original soundtrack of Medialab’s LAB#03  

For the second track of the original soundtrack of the LAB#03, Claude Speeed has collaborated with Stefan Samociuk.

Stefan Samociuk has a long and international career in computer graphics, geophysical exploration and music. He is currently researching an abstract entity he calls a “Protofield” and the associated operators that change the field states in a process called field remixing. The operators are based on prime numbers and form multi dimensional, ordered structures of natural numbers. These can be rendered as images by mapping the numbers to coloured pixels. His main interest in Protofields is how to render the operators as physical entities using nano scale metamaterial technology. He intends to see how they interact with quantum level systems and ultra violet analogue signal processing at PHz frequencies. Audio visual techniques form a major part of the research methodology. Prime numbers are considered to be constant throughout space and time, part of the fabric of our universe. Would a language based on prime numbers attain this universality to all sentient species aware of numbers?

In the film Geobells, they created audio visual representations of large numeric structures based on primes. The video maps number to coloured pixels and the audio maps number to audio frequency. A logarithmic musical scale using 36 notes was used. A listening zone defines an area of the graphic producing audio and this can be static or dynamically move across the area. Timbral content is added to the audio by allowing each pixel to have harmonics based on the colours of a region on neighbouring pixels. In the film we commence by listening to three letters from a geometric alphabet followed by its word representation. A longer sequence is next, described as a sentence. A larger graphic follows to represent part of a single entity dialogue. A dual sequence follows demonstrating the sound of a word and its phonetic spelling. Finally a sequence of alien poetry – interpreted using Ircam’s RAVE (Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder) model within Qosmo’s Neutone Audio Unit plugin, trained on a Bulgarian Female Choir – as we fly over a complex Protofield operator generated with a prime cellular automata.

Claude Speeed is a Scottish music producer and artist currently residing in Berlin, whose work investigates themes of memory, perception and futurity. Automation and stochastic processes have always been a major feature of his music, which in the last few years has evolved into generative AI and machine learning spaces. For the LAB#03, Speeed is creating an OST to the themes of Synthetic Minds, responding in sound and visuals.

A wide range of objects and systems can be considered to be minds or intelligences, many of those non-human and/or non-biological. Artificiality and the synthetic can be similarly broadly defined as patterns of intention and design. The scope of artificial intelligences or synthetic minds with respect to music tools starts to describe a space in multiple dimensions – not dissimilar to the latent space of machine learning models.