The Historically Informed AI: Johann Sperger through time and bass

https://aimc2023.pubpub.org/pub/0e9em7r7

Johann Sperger (1750-1812) was a composer and contrabass virtuoso. Even today, Sperger holds the record for composing the largest number of contrabass concertos. In his practice, Sperger thoroughly explored the technical and expressive boundaries of his instrument in a dynamic process of reciprocal negotiation between the performer’s and instrument’s agencies. At the time, Sperger’s explorations of the highest register of the contrabass posed a wild challenge to its teleological identity. In this work, we aim to further reflect upon his work by combining historically informed performance and musical instruments (contrabass and viola) with contemporary forms of notation and digital luthiery, including graphic scores, specifically designed controllers and neural synthesis. In order to join our apparently distant temporal and musical dimensions, we retraced the route from Trieste to Venice that Sperger traveled while revising his Sonata for Contrabass and Viola (1789). We collected sound samples that will be used to train our neural synthesis model. Sensors attached to the performers’ arms will render their movements as the manifestation of the composer’s, the performers’ and the instruments’ interactions. These movements will be used in the decoding module to inform the navigation of the model's latent spaces. The sound output of the decoder will be fed to the encoding module, generating a graphic score which will in turn influence the execution.