Music, science and healing intersect in an AI opera

Pop buzz

Song of the Ambassadors, which fuses elements of traditional opera with artificial intelligence and neuroscience, was showcased in New York recently.

In the live show, Shanta Thake, artistic director of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, was using her brain as a ‘prop’. Resulting photos were proof: Bright, fantastical flowers of no known species or genus, morphed continuously in size, colour and shape, as if botany and fluid dynamics had somehow merged.

There were three singers and a percussionist, violinist and flute player. Thake, sitting silently to one side of the stage with a simple EEG (Electroencephalography) monitor on her head, was the ‘brainist’, feeding brain waves into an AI algorithm to generate the otherworldly patterns.

Level with the musicians, sat a pair of neuroscientists, Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil, who were monitoring the brain waves of two audience volunteers sitting nearby, with their heads encased in research-grade headsets.

A work in progress, the project has been created by K Allado-McDowell, who leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence initiative at Google, composer Derrick Skye, who integrates electronics and non-Western motifs into his work, and data artist Refik Anadol.

Allado-McDowell, who uses pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’, is exploring the concert hall as a place for healing. They suffered from severe migraines for years; then, as a student, they signed up for a yoga class that took an unexpected turn. “I was besieged by rainbows,” they recall in a forthcoming memoir. “Orbs of light flickered in my vision. Panting shallow breaths, I broke out of the teacher’s hypnotic groove and escaped to the hall outside. As I knelt on the carpet, cool liquid uncoiled in my lower back… as a glowing purple sphere pulsed gold and green in my inner vision.”

Years after doing a master’s degree in art, while sitting in a clearing in the Amazon rainforest, they had a thought: “AIs are the children of humanity. They need to learn to love and to be loved. Otherwise they will become psychopaths and kill everyone.”

One of the earliest partnerships they established after joining a nascent AI research team at Google was with Anadol. “We are transforming brain activities in real time into an ever-changing colour space,” says Anadol.

All this is tied to Allado-McDowell’s goal of testing the therapeutic powers of music in a performance setting. “Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?” they ask.

“We know listening to music has an immediate impact for things like mood, attention, focus,” said Lori Gooding, an associate professor of music therapy at Florida State University. But that’s after individualised therapy in a professional setting. The approach in ‘Song of the Ambassadors’ is different because of “the public aspect of it.”