Danielle Mcculloch (She/ Her)
My project began in the psychological connection we have to music. Research shows the
outstanding effects that music can have on the brain, from altering mood, to having a profoundly
positive effect on some people suffering from illnesses such as dementia. I wanted to harness this
musical power and turn it into art. First, starting off by visualising it and then seeing how a computer
could replicate such effects. This led to generating code that would create musical scores and then
be transcribed into emotive and evocative musical pieces.
My interest in audio as a medium stems from my own love and practice of music. I have been
playing in orchestras and on my own from a young age and consider my connection to music to be a
key part of who I am today. Because of this, ‘An AI Orchestra’ is a deeply personal piece to me, and
in a way, reflects who I am as not only an artist, but also a musician. Through my research I
discovered that audio and audio-based visuals, and the ensuing reactions, are entirely down to
personal opinion. There is no formula to create music that everyone will enjoy and so, these pieces
are made ever more interesting based on people’s experiences of them.
AI Orchestra
Here is a fully curated set of manuscripts I put together at the end of the first semester. They are all initially generated through Processing and then transcribed onto manuscript paper. I then played this music on my clarinet and recorded, edited, and layered to be played back through headphones for people to experience. By changing how much influence I had during the transcribing process I was able to control how much of the music was artificially generated and how much of it was traditional human input.
