Samhengi welcomes Björn Þór Jónsson on Friday, January 23 at 12:15 in Dynjanda. Björn's lecture is entitled Sound other than you might wish for: unexpected discoveries with simulations of natural evolutionary processes.
More about the lecture:
If we consider the biggest AI models of the day as a mud puddle, then we are offered the opportunity to stir that puddle to see, and hear, new patterns Thus, a number of interesting things can be achieved but it all relies on what is already in the puddle To evolve forward as creative beings we need something more than the same stirring In a world of sounds, there are numerous possibilities and also challenges. It is possible to achieve all possible sounds through modern technology for sound synthesis (e. sound synthesis) but not all of them are equally accessible To utilize technology, expertise is needed, which can equally be rewarding and limiting: it is nice to gain skills in certain methods of synthesization than what we manage to discover is also limited to those skills. And when it comes to request products from artificial intelligence models, our vocabulary limits the sound world we manage to describe.
The advent of computers quickly sparked an interest in using them to create innovative sounds, but also to imitate how nature has found all its diverse solutions; first by encouraging the processes to set a goal but now in recent times by encouraging diverse discoveries, following the insight that often at first glance unexciting discoveries lead to discoveries that change everything.
If we look to the evolution of life, we see a huge diversity of complex organisms that have managed to evolve without visible goals, other than survival in different situations This is also true in our cultural history: humanity had not set the goal of developing indirect heating of food, but a fellow who worked with radar technology noticed that a chocolate bar melted in the pants pocket, and today we have microwaves, which we probably wouldn't have if we had pushed aside any discoveries that didn't seem likely to bring us closer to the microwave's goal.
What are the equivalents of future music microwaves in the form of innovative sounds? We probably fail to cast them out of a puddle full of sounds of the past, but participation in evolutionary processes that search far and wide in the space of all possible sounds may expose sounds that lead our creative processes into new paths.
The progress of a project that is about establishing such development processes can be monitored through the website https://synth.is
