Workshop | Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Nicola Leonard Hein and Gilbert Nouno: Dialogues with Improvising Machines: an Embodied Cross-Testing Workshop on Musical Agents
This 2.5-hour workshop examines four musical agent systems through a structured process of presentation, performance, collective listening, and critical discussion. It addresses a central contemporary question in computer music: how the design of musical agents encodes particular modes of listening, interaction, and agency, and how these design choices shape musical practice.
The workshop adopts a commented comparative-phenomenological methodology. It showcases four musical agent systems selected from an open call, which are presented in turn, each offering a distinct approach to interactive and improvisational musical behavior. These systems have been developed using different programming languages, creative coding environments, and technical frameworks, reflecting the diversity of current practices in the field. Their comparison will therefore highlight not only aesthetic and compositional differences, but also the ways in which specific tools and technical architectures condition musical affordances.
For each system, the creator will quickly introduce its technical design, musical aims, and underlying assumptions. This will be followed by a short performance by the system’s author, two exploratory performances by other workshop participants, and a discussion with participants and attendees. The emphasis throughout will be on the system’s interactional qualities, its encoded listening strategies, and the forms of musical agency that emerge in performance.
The final part of the workshop will be devoted to a comparative discussion of the four systems, with the aim of articulating shared vocabulary, critical perspectives, and possible evaluation criteria for improvising and interactive musical agents. In doing so, the workshop seeks to contribute to ongoing discourse on the role of bias, intention, and technological mediation in musical system design. This closing conversation will reflect on the different forms of musical interaction that emerged, and consider how we might develop shared vocabulary, aims, and evaluation criteria for improvising and interactive musical agents.
The workshop is intended for composers, improvisers, performers, creative coders, and researchers interested in interactive systems, machine listening, and AI in music. It particularly welcomes participants who wish to think critically about what it means to compose with, perform with, or delegate agency to computer-based musical systems.
By creating a space for presentation, experimentation, and peer critique, the workshop aims to deepen discussion around the role of encoded listening in musical agent systems and the musical practices that emerge from it.
The workshop is led by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana), Nicola Leonard Hein (University of Music Lübeck), and Gilbert Nouno (Haute école de musique de Genève), whose artistic and research practices span composition, improvisation, creative coding, and interactive systems.
Requirements
Listen and Discuss.
This workshop will be filmed and participants may also appear in photo or video recordings.
Workshop registration
Please register via Pretix in order to participate in the workshop. There are no additional costs.
About the workshop facilitators
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is a composer and performer on bass guitar and electronic devices, in solo and Group settings, between electroacoustic music, contemporary jazz, mixed music and improvised music. He also worked in popular music and practices critical creative coding. His music is available on empreintes DIGITALes.
He studied composition with Michel Tétreault, Marcelle Deschênes, and Jonty Harrison; bass guitar with JeanGuy Larin, Sylvain Bolduc, and Michel Donato; Analysis with Michel Longtin, and Stéphane Roy; and studio technique with Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, and Jean Piché.
Pierre Alexandre was Professor of Composition and Improvisation at the University of Huddersfield (England, UK) from 2005 to ’24, where he anchored the ERCsupported Fluid Corpus Manipulation project. In September 2024, he joined the team of the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana as a research professor in composition.
He likes spending time with his family, reading prose, and going on long walks.
Nicola Leonard Hein is a sound artist, guitarist, creative technologist, composer and researcher in music and philosophy. He is a professor of Sound Arts & Creative Music Technology at the music university of Lübeck.
His work is driven by the interaction of sound and space, light, movement, thought and the becoming of embodied and intermedial intelligence in aesthetic systems, community and technology. In his artistic work, he uses physical and electronic extension of the electric guitar, sound installations, cybernetic human-machine interaction with A.I. interactive music systems, Augmented Reality, telematic real-time art, ambisonic sound projection, instrument building, conceptual compositions, intermedia works (with video art, light, dance, literature) and much more.
His research revolves around questions of philosophy of music, epistemology, aesthetics, media theory, critical improvisation studies and cybernetics. It follows questions of the creation of identity and sense in interactions between humans and technology, and investigates the philosophical implications of musical and intermedial practices.
Gilbert Nouno composes, codes, improvises, and teaches at the Haute école de musique de Genève, where he leads the CIMME (Interdisciplinary Center for Experimental Music and Media). He likes to blend sound with image, and technology with the gestures of performance. Moving between tangible matter and dematerialized material, his hybrid works invite audiences to cross the ever-shifting boundary between human and machine. With artificial intelligence, he explores new playgrounds to expand improvisation, rethink performance, and imagine augmented artistic practices.
This approach is embodied in works such as SINE (2024), a performative multimedia piece in which gesture drives sound and video within an immersive, AI-based audiovisual environment. A laureate of the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto and the Académie de France à Rome Villa Medici, he has shared stages, studios, and creative adventures with composers Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Harvey, Olga Neuwirth, saxophonist Steve Coleman, flutist Magic Malik, choreographer Léo Lérus, scenographer Jean Kalman, and stage director Pierre Audi.