Emptyset, the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, are tireless innovators at the vanguard of electronic music. Over the course of the last decade the duo have consistently applied new and inventive compositional tools to create art that is both unique and poignant. Blossoms focuses on ideas of evolution and adaptation, bringing together Emptyset’s body of exploratory sound production with emerging methods of machine learning and raw audio synthesis.
Blossoms was generated entirely from the output of a neural network based artificial intelligence system. Developed over eighteen months through conversations with an international network of programmers working at the cutting edge of sound synthesis, Emptyset arrived at a system powerful and intelligent enough to create original complex structures of audio. Blossoms explores the dissonance between organic processes and machine learning principles, creating unsettling and uncanny sonics that give voice to non-human intelligence. Taking inspiration from cybernetics and literature, the album allowed Emptyset to further their explorations into generative composition and elemental aspects of sound, creating a system that was both inspiring and disconcerting in its behavior and results - opening up vast new possibilities and sonic worlds whilst simultaneously collapsing their previous methods of production.
The machine learning system for Blossoms was developed through extensive audio training, a process of seeding the software model with a sonic knowledge base of material to learn and predict from. This was supplied from a collection of their existing material as well as 10 hours of improvised recordings using wood, metal and drum skins. This collection of electronic and acoustic sounds formed unexpected outcomes as the system sought out coherence from within this vastly diverse source material, attempting to form a logic from within the contradictions of the sonic data set. The system ....... more
Emptyset, the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, are tireless innovators at the vanguard of electronic music. Over the course of the last decade the duo have consistently applied new and inventive compositional tools to create art that is both unique and poignant. Blossoms focuses on ideas of evolution and adaptation, bringing together Emptyset’s body of exploratory sound production with emerging methods of machine learning and raw audio synthesis.
Blossoms was generated entirely from the output of a neural network based artificial intelligence system. Developed over eighteen months through conversations with an international network of programmers working at the cutting edge of sound synthesis, Emptyset arrived at a system powerful and intelligent enough to create original complex structures of audio. Blossoms explores the dissonance between organic processes and machine learning principles, creating unsettling and uncanny sonics that give voice to non-human intelligence. Taking inspiration from cybernetics and literature, the album allowed Emptyset to further their explorations into generative composition and elemental aspects of sound, creating a system that was both inspiring and disconcerting in its behavior and results - opening up vast new possibilities and sonic worlds whilst simultaneously collapsing their previous methods of production.
The machine learning system for Blossoms was developed through extensive audio training, a process of seeding the software model with a sonic knowledge base of material to learn and predict from. This was supplied from a collection of their existing material as well as 10 hours of improvised recordings using wood, metal and drum skins. This collection of electronic and acoustic sounds formed unexpected outcomes as the system sought out coherence from within this vastly diverse source material, attempting to form a logic from within the contradictions of the sonic data set. The system ....... more