{"id":93571,"date":"2019-05-16T04:18:33","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T04:18:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.microsoft.com\/?p=432949"},"modified":"2019-05-16T04:18:33","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T04:18:33","slug":"ever-changing-music-shaped-by-skies-above-nyc-hotel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/05\/16\/ever-changing-music-shaped-by-skies-above-nyc-hotel\/","title":{"rendered":"Ever-changing music shaped by skies above NYC hotel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barwick composed five movements within an overall soundscape that reflect the constantly changing nature of the sky throughout the day, each with its own background of bass, synthesizer and vocal lines that weave in and out. For each \u201cevent,\u201d identified by Microsoft AI, she then created six synthesized and six vocal sounds for the generative audio program to choose from \u2013 for example, 60 different musical options a day for every time an airplane passes above. The sounds are an expression of Barwick\u2019s emotions in response to each stimulus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want it to be too literal,\u201d she says. \u201cI could have made it sound \u2018raindroppy,\u2019 but it\u2019s more about the attitude of the event. An airplane is a lot different than the moon, so it has more of a metallic sound than a warm sun sound or a quiet \u2018moony\u2019 kind of feeling. I wanted people who listen to it to be curious and wonder what that sound meant, what\u2019s going across the sky right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barwick has never been afraid of technology, even if she didn\u2019t have access to it. She recorded her first album in 2007 using a guitar pedal to form vocal loops on a cassette tape. \u201cI didn\u2019t even have a computer then,\u201d she remembers. \u201cI took my bag of tapes in somewhere to get mastered to produce the CD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now she relies on technology to compose, record and perform her multilayered, ambient music. She uses effects on everything, including her voice. There\u2019s no such thing as an unplugged Julianna Barwick set. Still, she says, \u201cBefore I was approached to do this project, the only thing I knew about artificial intelligence was from the movies. I\u2019d never seen an application of it in my daily life.\u201d<\/p>\n

So as she began exploring sounds, Barwick grappled not only with what AI was and could do, but also with what her role would be in comparison to its. Who was the actual composer \u2013 she or the program? Was AI a partner or a tool?<\/p>\n

\u201cI contemplated how the project would play out in my absence and realized that I can make all the sounds, but I\u2019m not going to be there to detect all the events \u2014 you have to rely on the AI to do that,\u201d Barwick says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s such an important part of the score; it\u2019s almost like it\u2019s a 50-50 deal. And that\u2019s what makes this project interesting. It almost brings in another collaborator, and the possibilities are endless. It\u2019s opened up a new world of thinking and approaching future compositions and scores.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"a
A camera sends live images to a Microsoft Azure computer vision tool, which assigns tags such as \u201cclouds\u201d or \u201csun.\u201d Those are fed into the system that technologists programmed after analyzing Barwick\u2019s compositions and distilling them into an algorithm, which then chooses which tracks to play together.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barwick composed five movements within an overall soundscape that reflect the constantly changing nature of the sky throughout the day, each with its own background of bass, synthesizer and vocal lines that weave in and out. For each \u201cevent,\u201d identified by Microsoft AI, she then created six synthesized and six vocal sounds for the generative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[135,415],"class_list":["post-93571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-feature-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}