SymFormer

2023: AI soloed for the first time in the world at a concert in Vladivostok

On September 10, 2023, as part of the Eastern Economic Forum, a concert was held in Vladivostok, where artificial intelligence from Sberbank became a soloist and improviser. Such an experiment was carried out for the first time in world history.

According to RIA Novosti, composer Pyotr Dranga, together with the Sberbank neural network and virtuoso soloists from China, wrote symphony No. 1 Cosmos for the Grand Symphony Orchestra. It was performed on the Primorsky stage of the Mariinsky Theater.

AI for the first time in the world soloed at a concert in Vladivostok

So, in the first and second parts of the composition, musicians from China soloed, and the SymFormer neural network model led the expressiveness of the sound directly on stage, using a virtual synthesizer for this. In the third and fourth movements of the symphony, the audience heard improvisation from SymFormer.

The uniqueness of today's event lies precisely in the fact that the neural network improvised in real time on the basis of the information that it received, - quotes the publication "Лента.ру" the words of Alexei Minin, chief expert on control technologies for experimental machine learning systems of Sberbank.

The art object, which has become a symbol of neuromusicant, has become a techno-matryoshka. Despite the fact that the organizers of the cultural event asked the audience not to applaud between the parts of the symphony, they still sometimes shouted "bravo" and clapped.

It is noted that Peter Dranga proposed neural networks to rethink the symphony, changing and supplementing it. Artificial intelligence has become a full-fledged participant in the creative process and co-author of the composition. The center of the music installation was SberBoom.

This is actually the first time in the world that this has happened, because artificial intelligence has finished, thought about, completed passages. Or he took and recycled... This is improvisation in real time, - said Peter Dranga, admitting that at the concert he first heard the "composition" of AI.[1]

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