Piece & Paper Session
Music Program Overview
He（龢）
Xiangbin Lin
Spores: A Physarum-Inspired Instrument for Agent-Based Ecological Interaction
Kyle Smith
Remnants
Nikos Baskozos
Paper Overview
Xiangbin Lin, Du Huang, Qi Qian and Maosong Sun Beyond Musique Concrète: “Perceptual Morphing via Audio Latent Embeddings Manipulation”
This paper proposes “Neural Musique Concr`ete”, a compositional paradigm that reinterprets the Quantized Audio Latent Embedding produced by Neural Audio Codecs (NACs) as a malleable digital “Sound Object” (L’Objet Sonore) amenable to direct artistic intervention. While end-to-end generative AI has dramatically accelerated music production, it confines creators to prompt-level interaction, effectively reversing the long-standing trend toward increasingly fine-grained control over acoustic micro-structures. To restore this creative agency, we introduce Latent Manipulation Functions (LMFs)—weighted summation with independent time-varying coefficients—that operate directly on the continuous latent space, enabling “Perceptual Morphing”: the deep semantic and
acoustic fusion of heterogeneous sound materials beyond waveform-domain superposition. The framework is validated through the electronic composition “He” (Harmony), whose three compositional phases (spectral fusion, stochastic granular scattering, and order-chaos coupling) demonstrate that tensor-based latent editing supports structurally complex musical forms; a complementary survey of five NACs further establishes the requirements for codec applicability. Our results indicate that direct manipulation of NAC latent embeddings effectively
bridges the high fidelity of modern AI systems with the fine-grained compositional control central to avant-garde electronic music.
Kyle Smith and Alexandria Smith Spores: “A Physarum-Inspired Instrument for Agent-Based Ecological Interaction”
The ecosystem is the interface. Spores (2025) is a touchscreen instrument where sound is activated based on simulated slime mold colonies finding food. The performer becomes part of the ecosystem and a caretaker alongside the slime mold. They read health, growth rate, stress, and territorial spread through observable organism behavior, the way one reads an animal’s body language. The per- former distributes resources rather than issuing commands, acting as caretaker to a system that resists mastery. In this paper, I discuss the theoretical underpinnings engaging with ecological systems, biomimetic systems, multi-agent systems in composition/instrument design, technical implementation, and composing for and performing with living environments where the performer becomes the care taker of an environment instead of the ”commander” of the environment. I discuss incorporating biophilic design practices into working with agent-based models (ABM) and
artificial intelligence in music, modes of interaction, and my biologically inspired process of collaborating with artificial intelligence. A seven-minute event-based improvisation demonstrates this approach across six sections exploring hunger, competition, and abundance.
Nikos Baskozos and Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris: “Data-driven algorithmic composition with large sample libraries: a modular system for the dynamic formation and control of spatialised sound groups”
This paper presents a Max/MSP abstraction library for data-driven algorithmic composition. It utilises large sample collections for the formation and temporal control of multiple subselections of the corpus. Each subselection is hosted in a separate container object and may be formed with its own querying rules, using various querying modes. These subselections are typically predefined and can be dynamically recalled and modified. Each subselection container is connected to its own pitch, timing, effects and playback modules. In addition to sequential playback of samples, which is more suitable for melodic and rhythmic explorations, the presented system offers the possibility of vertical playback. The vertical playback module provides temporal control of individual voices and is more suitable for harmonies and spectral techniques. Granular synthesis is possible with both playback modules. The system has been used for the composition of a few fixed-media works. The piece ‘Remnants’, described in this paper, partially explores the system’s available features.
About the pieces & artists
Xiangbin Lin: He（龢）
The electronic music composition “He” (龢) explores deep fusion mechanisms for heterogeneous sound materials through the direct manipulation of Audio Latent Embeddings (ALE). “He” (龢) is an ancient Chinese character. The conceptual framework derives from the etymology of the title character, where “Yue” (龠) symbolizes artificially constructed musical structures, while “He” (禾) signifies nature and vitality . Situated at the intersection of artificial operation and sonic origins, this work implements a novel method of sound fusion through the computational manipulation of the latent space.
About the artist
Xiangbin Lin is a master’s student in Electronic Music Composition at the Central Conservatory of Music. He received his bachelor’s degree in Electronic Music Production from the same institution, where he ranked first in his cohort and was recommended for direct admission to the master’s program. He studies under Professor Qi Qian, Associate Director of the Department of Music Artificial Intelligence and Music Information Technology at the Central Conservatory of Music.
He has received numerous honors, including the National Scholarship for Undergraduate Students, the Outstanding Graduate of Beijing award, the Beijing Advanced Class Collective Award, and the First-Class Academic Scholarship for Graduate Students. He has also been a multiple-time recipient of the Outstanding Student Scholarship and the Merit Student title of the Central Conservatory of Music.
Kyle Smith: Spores: A Physarum-Inspired Instrument for Agent-Based Ecological Interaction
Spores (2025) explores the relationship between non-deterministic emergence, artificial co-agency, and musical expression by reimagining the controller as an ecological system. The performer tends virtual slime mold colonies on a touchscreen running a real-time Physarum polycephalum agent-based model, seeding new colonies, distributing nutrients, and disturbing the environment. Health, stress, and territorial spread are continuously extracted and mapped to synthesis parameters via OSC and MPE MIDI. No food, no colonies. No colonies, no sound. The constraint becomes visible before it becomes audible. Six sections explore hunger, competition, and abundance across a seven-minute event-based improvisation, each isolating a different ecological condition. The ecosystem itself becomes the interface.
About the artist
Kyle Smith (b. 2000) is a designer, engineer, and multimodal artist working at the intersection of music technology, biomimetic design, and immersive systems. His research focuses on sensor-driven soundscapes, generative instruments, and ecological approaches to musical interaction. He is a second-year master’s student in the Creative Music Technology Lab (CMTL) at Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a B.S. in Creative Technology & Design from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Nikos Baskozos: Remnants
This fixed-media piece explores rhythmic patterns and creative sample browsing using a large sound collection. As detailed in the accompanying ICMC 2026 paper, “Data-driven algorithmic composition with large sample libraries: a modular system for the dynamic formation and control of spatialised sound groups”, the piece is realised with a custom system which utilises Music Information Retrieval for offline analysis and various querying modes for real-time navigation. For this piece, a corpus of about 20,000 one-shot samples is used, consisting of commercial libraries, personal recordings, and random sounds stored in random folders. Four subselections of sounds from the larger library are used and they are dynamically modified during the piece. Each group focuses on different frequency bands and structural roles in the music. Frame drum sounds comprise the low end, while mostly metallic sounds are present in the mid-range and high frequencies. From a reflective perspective, images of scrapyards emerge, both through the sound palette and as an analogy for the retrieval and recombination of materials. The sounds, as found in the library, are unsorted and decontextualised, with folk instruments coexisting alongside office foley sounds. Selection based on audio characteristics allows samples to be found and placed in a musical context. Samples are triggered continuously at 130 BPM, and rhythmic variations are generated through constrained random selection from the contents of each group. ‘Browsing solos’ integrated into the rhythm are heard frequently. These are created through continuous descriptor querying, allowing smooth transitions in sample selection.
About the artist
Nikos Baskozos is from Athens, Greece. He holds a diploma in architecture (U. Patras) and a master’s degree in music creation for new media (NKUA). In recent years, his main focus has been computer music, particularly working with large sound collections in Max/MSP. He recently completed an internship at IRCAM-STMS Lab, focusing on corpus-based synthesis and spatialisation.