Composer Benjamin Oliver (Department of Music) and Riot Ensemble present LOVE LETTERS, a series of contemporary works exploring creative applications of artificial intelligence (AI), on Monday 17 July 13:00 in Turner Sims Concert Hall.
British ‘soul sensation’ Hannah Williams joins quartet Riot Ensemble to premiere Benjamin Oliver’s song LOVE LETTERS. The work includes melancholic, absurd and dramatic expressions made with LovelaceGPT, a new AI text generation model developed by a University of Southampton research team including Will May (Department of English) and Shoaib Jameel (ECS).
AI Music and text generation, as well as sound processing, feature in five distinctive works by leading young composers. The startlingly gifted Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea guests for three vocal pieces.
Benjamin Oliver says:
“Last year, I approached Hannah Williams to collaborate on a song cycle, and then boom: ChatGPT landed. After experimenting a little, I found the generic quality of the content generated by ChatPT frustrating. I secured funding from the University of Southampton Web Science Institute to form a new research team, including literature professor Will May and AI expert Shoaib Jameel.
We developed LovelaceGPT, which creates first-person love texts. I’ve been setting these texts to music for Hannah to perform, accompanied by a quartet of keyboardists and percussionists from Riot Ensemble. While the texts may not always make sense (to say the least), it has been exciting to find unconventional musical materials that bring them to life in my new work, ‘LOVE LETTERS’”.
The concert is free to attend and all are welcome.
You can find out more and book your ticket on the Turner Sims website, or in person at the Turner Sims Box Office on Highfield campus.
