Composing for Acoustic Robots
Composing for Acoustic Robots
Composing for Acoustic Robots is the title of the postdoctoral research conducted by Alexandros Drymonitis at the Cyprus University of Technology as a member of the MADLab Media Arts & Design Research Lab. In this project, and through a series of short site-specific compositions, Alexandros Drymonitis explored real-time composition for acoustic instruments that can be controlled by a computer in collaboration with a human performer, based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The research was divided into two parts. In the first part, he collaborated with Professor Lorenda Ramou and the participants of her class “The Piano in the 20th and 21st Century” at the Athens Conservatoire. After collecting musical works written by the composers in the class, he trained an AI model that was used during a concert to assist in live composition. Using software he developed himself, he created musical scores in real time (live scoring) through live coding. These scores were performed by the students of Lorenda Ramou’s class on a Disklavier, a robotic piano, which was simultaneously controlled by the live coding software.
In the second part of the research, he collaborated with the Intelligent Instruments Lab at the University of Reykjavík, Iceland. In this phase, the instrument used was a MIDI church organ. An already trained AI model was employed, while original musical material was again used as input for the model in order to generate new musical content.
