Latent Music: Simulacral Sound Objects and Interreferential Drifts

This installation explores what I call latent music: AI text-to-audio generated sound objects that remain in-becoming and occupy liminal sign-spaces between instruments and genres, characterised by spectral semiotics and transductive individuation in metastable fields. Instead of pursuing genre fidelity or stylistic imitation, the work deliberately employs prompt constructions that cultivate semiotic tensions and associative drifts, resulting in sonic artefacts that resist categorical stability and fixed form. The artefacts presented were catalysed through constructed word-assemblages functioning as floating signifiers— linguistic constellations designed to activate processes of cross-material association, reterritorialisation, and liminality within latent space, where encoded stylistic fragments are dislodged from their conventional positions and recombined into distinct configurations that exist at the threshold of stable recognition. Prompts and resultant audio are presented together: language scrolls as a mode of sonic world-making, rendering audible an intersemiotic translation in which words catalyse sound. The installation features selected latent-music objects paired with their generative prompts (semiotic scores), creating a dialogue between linguistic activation and sonic materialisation. Visually, the prompts are displayed in real-time, revealing the semiotic scaffolding that produces these reterritorialized sound objects. As a focused study of contemporary TTA systems, realised through Udio, the installation demonstrates how such models can generate singular, threshold-dwelling sonic forms.