Composer Benjamin Oliver and Riot Ensemble present contemporary works that explore creative applications of artificial intelligence (AI).
British soul sensation Hannah Williams joins forces with a new music superstar, Riot Ensemble quartet, to premiere British composer Benjamin Oliver’s song cycle LOVE LETTERS. The work includes melancholic, absurd and dramatic expressions of love made with LovelaceGPT, a new AI text generation model developed by University of Southampton researchers.
AI music and text generation, as well as sound processing, feature in five distinctive works by leading young composers. The startingly gifted Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea guests for three vocal pieces.
Benjamin Oliver says:
“Last year, I approached Hannah Williams to collaborate on a song cycle and then boom, ChatGPT landed. After experimenting a little, I found the generic quality of the content generated by Chat-GPT frustrating. I secured funding from the University of Southampton Web Science Institute to form a new research team, including literature professor Will May and AI expert Dr Shoaib Jameel.
We developed LovelaceGPT, which creates first-person love texts. I’ve been setting these texts to music for Hannah to perform, accompanied by a quartet of keyboardists and percussionists from Riot Ensemble. While the texts may not always make sense (to say the least), it has been exciting to find unconventional musical materials that bring them to life in my new work ‘LOVE LETTERS’.”
The ‘LOVE LETTERS’ song cycle will later feature on ‘Too Many Sweets’, Benjamin Oliver’s first portrait album, due for release by Birmingham Record Company in April 2024. The album includes five works created since 2020 for instrumental/vocal forces performing alongside bespoke low-memory synthesisers designed by Blake Troise (aka PROTODOME). Other artists featured include New York-based toy pianist Dorothy Chan in the title track ‘Too Many Sweets (when Dorothy Met Blake)’, Clíodna Shanahan on the London Sinfonietta commissioned ‘A-Listers’ and pianist Yshani Perinpanayagam performing ‘DripFeeder’.
