Future Music #3 at Royal Northern College of Music

The Royal Northern College of Music has been examining the future of music since the PRiSM Future Music festival in 2019. Since then, they’ve helped shine a light on such developments in new music as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and live coding.

This year is a two-day, live-streamed celebration of cross-disciplinary collaboration with machine learning specialists teaming up with audiovisual artists and even the sounds of health data researchers music created from their COVID-19 experiences. 

Things kick off on Wednesday with Unsupervised, a new concert series created by the Machine Learning for Music Working Group – a community of composers and audiovisual artists exploring the creative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning led by PRiSM Lecturer in Composition, Dr. Sam Salem and Professor Ricardo Climent, Professor of Interactive Music Composition and Director of NOVARS Research Centre at the University of Manchester. 

Unsupervised will include new works by Anastasios Asonitis, Hongshuo Fan, Robert Laidlow, Zakiya Leeming, Tywi Roberts, Chris Rhodes, Ellen Sargen and Vicky Clarke. 

Thursday’s events are split into two sections, the first is Dawn, on the Morning After the Storm a new work by composer and PRiSM Doctoral Researcher, Zakiya Leeming, who has been collaborating with health data researchers to create music informed by their work. The piece is a result of discussions with members of the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium about their experience of working through the COVID-19 outbreak.

Future Music ends on Thursday evening with a world première, The Awesome Machinery Of Nature, a video and sound installation, currently designed for the web, with plans for it to be later adapted to an immersive multi-screen, multi-speaker installation. That will be followed by a Q&A and is proceeded by Memo Akten who will deliver The Michael Kennedy International Research Lecture.