c Dmitri Djuric
For over a decade, composer and performer Jennifer Walshe has worked with AI, training machine-learning systems on her voice and confronting what it means to become a musical “data body.” Walshe’s A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, an album of the year in The Wire, The Quietus, and The Irish Times, brings AI to bear on perhaps the least likely candidate – the early history of Western Music. In A Late Anthology, Walshe maps the development of the network’s understanding of her voice onto the history of early Western music, producing a new alternative tradition, a proposal for a different way of thinking about, listening to and making a history of Western music.
In this performance, Walshe and Nadar Ensemble navigate this brave, new, and very much uncanny world together. Expect covers of Hildegard von Bingen, Pérotin, Palestrina and John Dowland, via a historically un-informed practice, where humans to listen across the machine-human divide, attempting to understand what little machines understand of them.
Performance: Jennifer Walshe, Nadar Ensemble
Co-production: DE SINGEL, Gaudeamus Festival, Nadar Ensemble