I had a great time in the sound landscape of the lobby of a Bjrk hotel generated by IA – NewsDio

The musical sound landscape powered by Microsoft AI from Bjrk is now in New York.

Microsoft

Upon entering the lobby of a hotel in Bowery, a few meters from the New Museum in Manhattan, you can find yourself in a small space where Bjrk's music is played. Fragments of it, environmental, seemingly continuous, random. I am in the hotel lobby, listening. There is a pattern in music. It is connected to a camera on the roof, watching the clouds and birds moving. The composition is driven by AI. The best part is that it is invisible and it works. I stay and listen for an hour.

Bjrk created a new experimental environmental musical piece generated by AI in collaboration with Microsoft, called Korsafn, for the Sister City hotel (a boutique branch of the Ace hotel group). It's the second piece of ambient music here: Julianna Barwick created the hotel's previous environmental sound landscape, also a collaboration of Microsoft, last year. Bjrk's new music installation should remain until the end of this year.

Bjrk's Korsafn is a choral piece generated by algorithms that study cloud and bird patterns from a rooftop camera, but that will also evolve over time, becoming an AI data collection experiment for Microsoft. Since the installation reflects information from the sky, it is almost like an audio skylight or a data driven wind chime. The ongoing computer vision project will also enable Microsoft AI to better recognize dense and fluffy clouds, snow, rain, clear sky and birds in different lighting conditions and seasons.

I'm still resting spiritually from a week of noise CES in Las Vegas, and this little moment with Bjrk digital was something I could have used in the desert. Ryan Bukstein, brand vice president of Atelier Ace Hotel, says sound landscapes driven by artificial intelligence like this could be a future model for hotels and other spaces, rather than repetitive playlists of familiar songs.

I love Bjrk. I love the idea of being immersed in a Bjrk sound landscape.

Bukstein says the project began when Bjrk performed at The Shed in New York last year, and when 50 rooms at the Sister City hotel were home to the Bjrk Icelandic choir for a month while performing the acclaimed Cornucopia concert. "They rehearsed in the restaurant. You would come here, and the choir would be singing in the restaurant, they would be here all day, they would leave their mark on this space." While the Bjrk project was not recorded in Sister City, it says: "I would like to feel that they took part in the vibe."

Korsafn is charming and discreet, and honestly, it simply merges with the background. It's nothing wild, but it fits the hotel. It is fascinating in that regard. Unlike Microsoft's AR installations, such as a 2018 Experience connected with Mel Chin HoloLens In Times Square, this does not require much configuration (or failures). It simply is.

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After an hour, he did not become annoying or too repetitive.

Amy Sorokas, director of Strategic Alliances at Microsoft, helps produce musical art projects using Microsoft technology, with artists ranging from Brian Eno to Muse. He explains that AI updated live, using computer vision to analyze the hotel's rooftop camera, "can find different types of clouds: clusters, nimbus, birds, flocks of birds, a single bird, a plane. And what what we did is to say, now we are continually training our vision service. So we can make him learn over time from the ceiling chamber and the feeding. We can train continuously, so he will learn more about the clouds, learn more about Las seasons change, so next year, when winter comes back, it will be like, & # 39; Oh, yes, winter is back again & # 39 ;, and now the clouds have this kind of shapes and varieties, and the sun it comes to these times. The composition is going to be learned and generated differently based on that change in the level of knowledge of AI. "

The composition is coral, extracted from a variety of recordings and applied to what the camera sees, such as an audio map. I am sitting in the lobby, which has no skylight, and I wonder what will happen to provoke that sudden and growing voice? A bird, maybe?

Strangely, I would love something like that in my living room while I am reading. Or an ever-changing AI-driven soundtrack for my headphones, while I move, work and travel. If you're curious to listen, Sister City is broadcasting the soundtrack live along with the power of the rooftop camera to which the music is connected.

Or you can visit yourself. I want to one day generate music based on my life, in my ears, on my daily trip to New Jersey.

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I had a great time in the sound landscape of the lobby of a Bjrk hotel generated by IA - NewsDio