At Moworks, we are all music and technology enthusiasts and creatives looking for innovative ideas.
Nothing is better than combining work and entertainment, gathering information, connecting with other enthusiasts from our field and having fun, all of that at the same time.
That is why we visited Sónar 2022 in Barcelona and its technology conference called Sónar+D. Sonar is an international music festival and congress focused on technology and creativity.
The three-day-long festival hosted around 130 artists, 19 speakers, 13 stages and more than 100 000 visitors.
Sónar by day, Sónar by night, Sónar +D
Sónar by Night and Sónar by Day is all about concerts and performances, hosting well-known artists like Bonobo, Chemical Brothers, Richie Hawtin, Moderat, Anfisa Letyago, and Reinier Zonneveld and many others. There are a lot of opportunities for dance and entertainment.
Sónar +D is a technology conference dedicated to creativity, design and music technology. It offers a possibility to learn, discover and meet others.
What unreached us the most from the conference Sónar+D 2022?
You can find our top picks below.
'Being a curious music mind'
Experiment results by IDIBELL (the brain plasticity and cognition unit of the Hospital de Bellvitge).
Can our curiosity about music increase our willingness to spend more money on songs?
Can we memorize a song better if our curiosity level is higher?
Do songs with similar properties generate similar curiosity levels?
Do participants with similar profiles generate similar results?
Neuroscientist Antoni Rodríguez Fornells and DJ Alicia Carrera, accompanied by neuroscientist Robert Zatorre (McGill University, Montreal) and Sony digital sales specialist and founder of Indiemono Carlos López Casany, have answered our questions as follows:
We have learned that: The higher the curiosity, the greater the probability that the participant pays for that song. Also, the higher the curiosity level is, the more robust is our memory of that song.
What was surprising is that similar songs did not generate the same curiosity levels. But people with similar profiles generate comparable results based on internal factors like musical sensitivity, musical tastes, and previous experience with the type of music rather than external such as rhythm, harmony, and structure.
Andreas Refsgaard: 'Playful Machine Learning' Masterclass
How can artificial intelligence be used for entertainment and interaction on the web?
Andreas Refsgaard is a Copenhagen-based artist and creative coder that uses machine learning to explore the possibilities of digital technologies.
His interactive work is humorous and irreverent yet carries a severe undertone, offering a wide scale of ideas on how to play and interact with AI. Here are three of our favourites:
Eye Conductor
It is a musical interface allowing to play music through eye movements and facial gestures. Eye Conductor helps people with physical disabilities. Play an instrument, build beats, sequence melodies, or add effects just with facial expressions.
Teachable Machine
The next project Andreas presented at Sónar +D is an experiment in collaboration with Use All Five, Google PAIR and Google Creative Lab, teaching how machine learning works. Teachable Machines is interactive and fun, using a camera. It uses the open-source library tensorflow.js. Therefore, we can run machine learning models like this in the browser. It is easy to use. You can select what kind of output (music, speech, picture) should each gesture represent.
Doodle Tunes
Turn your drawings into musical instruments and play actual music.
Doodle Tunes is an application that uses computer vision and convolutional neural networks to analyze a drawing on a piece of paper. Is there any sketch that looks like a bass guitar, saxophone, or drum? Doodle Tunes will play the instrument in Ableton Live.
'Future of Music: AI-driven Virtual Artists'
Metaverse experience presented by Sensorium Galaxy
Playing roles is part of our life. When it comes to gaming and computers, it started back then, playing tabletop role-playing games like Dungeon & Dragons. Then we moved into the computer environment playing similar text games, then playing games like World of Warcraft or League of Legends. Technology is moving forward; we have online games on the blockchain and metaverse.
Metaverse is a virtual reality world with unlimited possibilities for consumers, creators, and both - human and artificial intelligence.
Sensorium Galaxy presents such a metaverse. A unique platform where artificial intelligence-driven DJs and real DJs, dancers, performers and visitors experience a futuristic concept of parting, socializing, and discovering their digital selves. Sensorium collaborates with music celebrities like David Guetta, Carl Cox, Armin Van Buuren, Steve Aoki and many more. Being backed by many well-known artists on board with game developers like Epic Games makes an impact that will shape our way of experiencing (virtual) reality, music, and art.
We are happy to hear that there is such an enormous movement around metaverse, artificial intelligence, and music technology. It brings the potential for software developers, 3D designers, and other creatives to collaborate and create new, futuristic projects.
One of the futuristic projects we are working on is Music Machine – an interactive machine that can create music autonomously. Be sure to learn more about it here:
We hope to see you somewhere at the next music technology conference.
Team Moworks.