Echo Chamber

Echo Chamber is a participatory sound installation using MusicGen's audio generative AI. Participants play a short melody on a piano, which is then used as a reference for MusicGen to generate multiple versions of itself. These evolving echoes of the original are played back through a multi-channel speaker installation. The work alludes to concerns about generative AI creating a monoculture through a feedback cycle of data scraping, copying and regenerating. By deliberately engaging with (and simultaneously serving as a critique of) MusicGen's innate tendency to stay within predictable melodic and harmonic structures, we can layer and loop multiple versions of the AI-generated audio while staying musically coherent. The layering of multiple samples also allows us to produce a real-time participatory work despite the time required for the AI generations (which currently take longer to generate than the length of the audio samples generated). A piano was chosen as the interface through which an audio reference is created by participants, as it plays on the familiarity and ubiquity of the instrument, which has become both a symbol and a tool of colonisation. Not only has the keyboard become a dominant interface for music-making, the equal-tempered scale has become pervasive across the globe in most popular music cultures, relegating other modes and scales to the fringe – a pattern repeated by generative AI amplifying what is already amplified.