Just got around to uploading a July interview I did with Sara Firth from London Live about the Love Letters [with AI] project…
Tag Archives: riot ensemble
Love Letters [with AI]
Was a total joy working with the amazing Hannah Williams, awesome musicians from Riot Ensemble and a brilliant research team from the University of Southampton on the ‘Love Letters [with AI]’ project. Ash Sealy (@whatabouttheash) captured the London gig fantastically. I’m really proud of this project and especially my new 7-song cycle Love Letters. We recorded it last week too and hopefully the cycle will feature on my portrait album next year…
Riot Ensemble with Hannah Williams & Stephanie Lamprea: LOVE LETTERS [WITH AI]
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 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 : Rob Laidlow, Zakiya Leeming, Anna Appleby, Oliver Sellwood and Megan Steinberg. The ‘startingly gifted’ Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea guests for three vocal pieces.
The LOVE LETTERS [WITH AI] project is supported by the University of Southampton Web Science Institute & Department of Music.
Riot Ensemble with Hannah Williams & Stephanie Lamprea: LOVE LETTERS [WITH AI]
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 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 : Rob Laidlow, Zakiya Leeming, Anna Appleby, Oliver Sellwood and Megan Steinberg. The ‘startingly gifted’ Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea guests for three vocal pieces.
The LOVE LETTERS [WITH AI] project is supported by the University of Southampton Web Science Institute & Department of Music.
‘Love Letters’ Premiere
Super excited about the upcoming premiere performances of my new song cycle, Love Letters, for Hannah Williams and Riot Ensemble. The texts for the songs have been created by a new AI language model – LovelactGPT. You can hear it at Turner Sims (17 July) and Kings Place (19 July). Come!
LOVE LETTERS [WITH AI]
I’m excited to have received some funding from the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton to lead an interdisciplinary project exploring artificial intelligence language generation of song texts. The ultimate outcome will be a new song cycle for British soul sensation Hannah Williams and a superstar quartet of Riot Ensemble players, which we’ll premiere in Southampton and London in July 2023!! More soon!
The Driver
Terrific workshop last week with Riot Ensemble for my collaboration with poet Luke Wright. Exciting to be putting stuff together and making plans for a tour, hopefully in 2021.
Here’s a taster of the poetry:
Is this how it ends for all of us?
love born at festivals
in chemicals and poetry
love that lived beyond our bodies
love that conquered motorways and calendars
love that conquered half of England
is this how it ends?
from The Driver, by Luke Wright
More info and some taster audio on the Riot Ensemble website: http://riotensemble.com/the-driver/
Luke Wright & Riot Ensemble
Back in 2015 I wrote a piece with the amazing poet Luke Wright for the London Sinfonietta, which we performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was a great experience and I’m delighted that our collaboration will continue as we develop a new piece for, and with, Riot Ensemble over the coming year or so. The first stage of development is 2 days together in mid-September to try out some ideas and get things moving. This will happen at my stomping ground at the University of Southampton and is possible thanks to Riot Ensemble’s Arts Council funding and some support from the University. Big thanks to Aaron Holloway-Nahum for believing in the project and being so supportive.
Exciting to see what happens!
‘Songs for Stanley’ Recording
Aaron Holloway-Nahum, director of the excellent Riot Ensemble, has just put up a recording of my Riot and Juice Vocal Ensemble commissioned piece ‘Songs for Stanley’. The recording is from Juice’s performance earlier this year at the Wednesdays at the Forge series.
‘Songs for Stanley’
So the boy arrived, he’s called Stanley Robin Oliver and is great!
This means that Juice will premiere ‘Songs for Stanley’ next Thursday 6th November at 7pm in Shoreditch Church alongside a couple of new pieces by Holly Harrison and Amy Beth Kirsten for Juice and the Riot Ensemble. Details available here. Should be fun and hope to see you there!
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