SYNTHETIC MIXTAPE #01 - LAB#03 OST

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

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 will be 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.

For his first track, Speeed fine-tuned Dance Diffusion – an audio offshoot of the Stable Diffusion image generation machine learning model – on 1990s UK Jungle one hits and pads selected by Jamie Teasdale/Kuedo. The fine-tuned model provided them with hundreds of example sounds, which Kuedo then curated and classified and in some cases applied granular synthesis. They then arranged the samples on the timeline together with minimally composed notes of granular synth, and combined with basic FX: chorus, reverb and delay. No extra instruments were used – all sounds came from the AI model samples.

Similarly, the video accompanying it was made algorithmically using Hydra video synth by Olivia Jack applied to processed found footage from a series of science fiction films contemporary to, and referenced by, UK Jungle artists and labels – combining, and recombining shots exclusively from the perspective of an alien intelligence. 

Kuedo is a project of the British artist Jamie Teasdale, under which he creates widescreen electronic music standing on the fine lines between shoegaze tinged pop, minimalist UK bass music, and avant garde soundscapes. Otherworldly in palette but often explosive in dynamics, his signature is to fuse dream-like melodics with contemporary UK club influences, often evoking a sense of melancholy and yearning.

TRACK 02 / TRACK 03 / TRACK 04 / TRACK 05