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Artificial intelligence entered the realms of music quite some time ago, but only recently it began composing its own songs and even making vocals. While rock and some pop songs seemed to be the last "meccas" where the voice of the singer could not be fully robotically mediated, the situation has changed and a whole album of robotic pop-rock songs will be published this year.

In my talk and discussion, I would like to address critically the issues that were of concern not only to Roland Barthes (the grain of the voice, pheno song) and Thomas Turino (music as a fundamentally social phenomenon), but also to the phenomenology of performance and embodiment. Can robots mediate the bodily experience, the physical inscriptions, often coming from (love) relationships that move us in songs? Can artificial intelligence create the "grain of the voice"?

Bio: Blanka Maderova, PhD. is a professor of philosophy and literature at Charles University, a musician, and composer working at Faust studios in Prague. In music, she uses mostly analogue machines, in philosophy she favors phenomenology. As for education, having received her PhD from Charles University, she did her post-doc at Harvard University. Her courses at Charles University are focused on the issues of identity, performance, technicity, and the semiotics of Prague. She has published a book called To Touch the World: Czech musical alternative 1968-2013. And at Harvard University, during her post-doc, she focused on music counterculture, phenomenology of embodiment and neuroscience. While being openly critical of the "technologization" of humans, especially in relation to ethics and intersubjectivity, she considers how several "technical" (in the Greek sense of TECHNÉ) aspects of humans can be beneficial.

Link:
Faust Studios

[image source: Blanka Maderova]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]