Violinist Hilary Hahn premieres ‘out of body’ - a collaboration between composer David Lang and AI Software OpenAI’s MuseNet.

Commissioned by DeepMusic.ai as a way to explore the collaboration between human artists and artificial intelligence software, the piece brings together AI generated notes in the up bows with Lang’s composed notes in the down bows. 

Lang explains: ’My piece for Hilary Hahn is called ”out of body” and I wrote it with the help of notes generated through an artificial intelligence program. I began with the idea of writing a piece in which a computer and I were both compositionally equal. Or at least as equal as a flawed, temperamental human and a coolly calculating piece of software could be.

’My solution was to have an equal number of notes supplied both by me and by the computer, and that the notes would alternate between each other – one from the human, one from the machine. In this way the whole piece could be a unity, made from an equal mingling of man and machine.’

Watch: Hilary Hahn’s two-year-old tells her to ‘practise slow’

Read: Advice I’d give my younger self: violinist Hilary Hahn

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