Paper Session 10a: AI & Sonification
Session Chair: Paulo Chagas
Paper abstracts
Bob Sturm and Elin Kanhov: “oljud—ʇᴉnɹq(n): A Sonic Manifesto of Resistance to Generative AI in Music”
Some discourses about music and AI are frustratingly shallow and insular, raising outdated musical tropes and ignoring modern developments, flattening the rich and varied functions of music in life, and overlooking serious ethical issues with the technology (creating it, maintaining it, using it, and imposing it). We respond to this shallowness via artistic activism and agonistic artistic research, resulting in the site-specific work “oljud—bruit (n)”. Our action was directed at an “AI music composition” competition in 2025 organised as part of a very expensive engineering workshop focused on music generation research, but our motivations are more broad. This paper records the context, composition and realization of our “sonic manifesto of resistance”, which was ultimately disqualified from the competition.
Ling Qi, Teng Ma and Alexandria Smith: “Music of Changing Lines: Toward a Culturally Situated Approach to the I-Ching”
The I-Ching is one of the most influential texts in Chinese intellectual history, integrating divination, cosmology, and ethical reflection. While Western experimental music, most notably John Cage, has drawn on the I-Ching as a source of chance operation, such appropriations have often detached its formal mechanisms from the interpretive and philosophical processes that give the text meaning. This work, Music of Changing Lines, presents an interactive system that re-centers the I-Ching as a meaning-bearing framework rather than a neutral randomizer. Users per- form Wen Wang Fa coin casting, which is accompanied in real time through probabilistic musical processes. The resulting hexagrams and changing lines are interpreted by a large language model, Gemini, in relation to the user’s inquiry. This textual interpretation is then translated into a prompt for a generative music model, Lyria, producing a responsive musical realization. By situating AI as an interpretive intermediary rather than a compositional authority, the system foregrounds the I-Ching’s ritual, interpretation, and participation as the primary sonic materials. Music of Changing Lines extends process-driven traditions in computer music by demonstrating how generative AI can support participatory, meaning-driven musical processes without prescribing musical structure or replacing human agency.
Changda Ma, Sunshiyu Wang, Canting Zhu and Alexandria Smith: “Extending Xenakis: From Architectural Geometry to Sonification of the Philips Pavilion”
Architecture and music have been linked through proportion and temporal structure, yet architectural geometry is rarely viewed as a source of generative music. Revisiting Xenakis’ one-directional transformation from string glissandi in Metastaseis to the ruled surfaces of the Philips Pavilion, we invert this workflow and sonify the completed Pavilion as a temporal composition. We reconstruct the Pavilion as nine ruled surfaces, extract their governing ruling lines, and subdivide each surface into structural lines and spatial sampling points. Four evenly spaced ruling lines per surface generate continuous string glissandi, while 3,357 sampled points develop five density-based energy blocks and a sparse brass and woodwind subsequence. Implemented in Python, the system produces MIDI rendered in Ableton Live, accompanied by a real-time 3D visualization that reveals architectural motion, stasis, and structural contrast through sound and image. In general, this work paves the way for the transfer of architectural geometry as a performable musical structure, extending Xenakis’s architectural and musical thinking to sonification and interactive music practice.