Singularity Sounds - AI & the Internet in Musical Performance

Singularity Sounds brings together two of the UK's foremost contemporary music performers, David Zucchi (saxophone) and Stephanie Lamprea (soprano), for an ambitious musical programme at the intersection of advanced technology, post-Internet aesthetic, and virtuosic performance.

The concert presents a pair of substantial experimental compositions developed by Robert Laidlow (Jesus College & Faculty of Music) in creative collaboration with the performers over the last eighteen months.

Each work presents, among other ideas, a view on storytelling. content (2024 - first performance), for saxophone and electronics, explores individual and collective identity in a digitally native world. It uses as musical material the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and are told on the Internet, such as AI-generated memes, advertisements, video game streaming, news cycles, and echo chambers. Post-Singularity Songs (2023) is a creation myth from a speculative post-human world, with a text derived from conversations with AI language models custom-made for this piece. It touches on mythology, the nature of time, death, the relationship between AI and truth, and free will and includes additional texts by Emily Dickinson and John Donne.