New World Notes

Listen: Music Inspired by Gödel, Escher, Bach Co-Created by an Artificial Intelligence Trained on Bach and Human Interaction With the AI

Click above to hear something fairly amazing: Music created by a merger of Bach, artificial intelligence, and live interaction by a human audience. It's from the new album "The Eternal Golden Braid" by my pal adaptive music/sound artist Robert Thomas, who's been creating works of music shaped by virtual reality, digital interaction, and AI for well over a decade. (As here with Chris Nolan and Hans Zimmer and more recently here with the LA Phil).

This current project, as the title suggests, was inspired by the landmark book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and incorporates music from Bach himself. As Robert explains in his liner notes:

This piece started life as a collection of renderings from a machine learning process which was trained on a large database of works by Bach. I then curated some fragments from it and used them as a starting point for a composition for string trio.... We wanted to explore having the audience interact live with the music in a collective strange loop, so I constructed the piece in two "levels" which the players could move between at any time. Level 1 was calmer and more introspective and represented by Blue. Level 2 was more chaotic and extroverted and represented by Red. When the piece was performed the audience held up colored cards, which were recognized by a machine learning camera on the stage. This fed a signal to the players which told them which musical notation to read. 

So this is, as Robert puts it to me now, "music composed in collaboration with an AI, which was trained on Bach, then performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, with the audience interacting, guiding the music. Aspects of the music were inspired by themes in Gödel, Escher, Bach, though: At the start and end you hear kinda shepherd tones played by the strings; these are one of the strange loops referred to in Marcus du Sautoy's talk about [Hofstader's book]."

The live performance looked like this:

Watch, Listen: Teaser to Chouchou's New Concept Album "Hello, Astronauts”

This is a new teaser for "Hello Astronauts", the next concept album from Chouchou, the Japanese duo which launched its music career over a decade ago by performing live in Second Life. Since then they've gone on to gather a pretty large following, but if you're most familiar with Chouchou through its dreamy, otherworldly SL sim, this latest project will evoke similar feelings of dreamy otherworldliness. As Chouchou's spokesperson tells me: 

Watch: Chouchou Debuts First Experimental Album, Here's the Trailer

Here's a hypnotic and delicately beautiful video for your Thursday -- the trailer to "oort", the new album from Chouchou, the acclaimed Japanese duo with a beloved, now-preserved virtual world experience in Second Life, 

Ooort? It is, as the band's spokesperson told me: "[It's] the cloud-like origin of comets that are considered that they had information of creatures and struck the earth in ancient times. And that is how life arrived on earth, so it might be the origin of us."

The full album is for sale online here.

Chouchou's Upcoming Album Now for Pre-Sale, Listen to a Free Track

Chouchou, the acclaimed Japanese duo with a beloved, now preserved virtual world experience in Second Life, just put up a free teaser track to their upcoming new album "oort", which is available for pre-sale now, and like their SL installation, it's dreamy, twinkly, mysterious. Yes, it's called "oort" -- which as Chouchou's spokesperson says:

Chouchou's Legendary Second Life Sims Saved by Linden Lab; "The Babel", the Band's Interactive Music Sim Gone from SL in 2013, To Be Restored

Glorious news for fans of the Chouchou sims, the beloved, dreamy Second Life regions owned and created by Chouchou, the acclaimed Japanese music duo of the same name, After reports that the sims would be closed last Summer, the band and Linden Lab have reached an agreement to keep them in SL.

I wrote "sims" because that will include The Babel, the band's reactive music experience that hasn't been in Second Life since 2013. (See above.) "[It] will be back in Second Life thanks to Linden Lab's kind arrangements," Chouchou's spokesperson says.

Even better news: While other classic sims have been restored by Linden Lab, only to become non-interactive ghost towns, Chouchou tells me the band and its management will maintain a live presence in them:

Listen: Keiko Takamura's Long-Awaited Fablewave Deluxe Drops -- Full-Length Album Inspired by Video Games, Fairy Tales, and Pop Culture

At long last here is Fablewave Deluxe from Keiko Takamura, the Bay Area-based popstar who (as longtime NWN readers know) first launched her singing career over a decade ago by performing in Second Life. And as you would expect, it's sharp and smart, dazzling pop music for geeks -- inspired by games The Path, Alice: Madness Returns, and speed-running platformers, plus The Little Mermaid and Batman: The Animated Series.

"Fablewave Deluxe is my attempt to connect listeners to my experiences through video games, fairy tales, and pop culture," as she puts it. "You don't know me, but you probably vaguely know the story of The Little Mermaid. So you can connect to 'She's Got Legs, You Idiot' when I say, 'This world is so new and/ I almost feel human'. You don't know me, but you probably know what happens to Batman's parents. So when I write a love song called 'Martha Wayne', you can guess that it's bittersweet.  Musically, I wanted each song to be its own vignette. Each song exists in a separate environment where the song has the best chance to tell its story, uninhibited by genre. My biggest influences going into this were Shiina Ringo, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and the SF Bay Area chiptune scene."

And yes, her SL fans will connect with one song on the album in particular:

Behold: Baby Metal Avatar Cosplay Tribute Group Performing in Second Life

Today is Tuesday: Time to rock your face off with Baby Metal cosplay (from the SL-based group's 1 year anniversary live show last week). The rapid-fire choreography is even more impressive when you realize how this coordination between several avatars separated by thousands of miles is made possible:

Listen: "Martha Wayne", A Love Song from Batman's Mom -- Written & Performed by Keiko Takamura & Alice Knows Karate

Perfect listening for Valentine's Day, this is "Martha Wayne" from Alice Knows Karate, the new project from legendary geek pop artist Keiko Takamura. (Stream above, buy a copy from Keiko and crew from many platforms here.) Keiko launched her career as a live singer in Second Life (featured on MTV), and has been creating and performing insanely catchy songs ever since, much of them devoted to characters and stories from beloved games and comics. This one is a sexy, smart, torch songy take on Batman's origin story, as told by an often unacknowledged character: Batman's mom Martha Wayne.

"I wanted to write a song that was like if Lana Del Rey wrote a love ballad for Batman: The Animated Series," Keiko explains.
The show's composer, Shirley Walker, used music to really cement the iconic goth-deco aesthetic -- I wanted to capture a little bit of that as an homage. I also wanted to write a love song that acknowledged the impermanence of life, the inevitability of death (wow, Herzog much?) Choosing to relish that fact rather than avoid it."

And yes, Martha Wayne doesn't exactly have a happy ending, but Keiko insists this is still a song for Valentine's Day:

Fortnite Follows Second Life's Footsteps Further Hosting "Live" In-Game Concert of RL Popstar Marshmello

First came in-game dance clubs, then came private, user-customizable islands, now right on schedule, Fortnite is following Second Life's footsteps yet again with Marshmello, a rising EDM star, who's reportedly performing live in-game this weekend:

Info is continuously coming out about the event as we speak, but here’s what we know so far. The event will begin at 2 PM ET on Saturday, though it’s not clear how long it will run for. It takes place in Pleasant Park, though you may see the lights/hear the music from anywhere on the map... There’s apparently a cosmetic bundle for the event which will include a Marshmello skin, pickaxe and spray. No word on pricing. There are some leaked animations that show “DJ dancing” for lack of a better term which would appear to be how Marshmello himself will act on stage.

Since Fortnite Battle Royale is run on thousands of separate servers, it's debatable how "live" Marshmello is actually going to be, beyond the lucky 100 (or so) players who get to be in his actual server. The chatter in Reddit's Fortnite board strongly suggests his music files are already embedded in the game client; if that's right, there may be hundreds or even thousands of automated copies of Marshmello's performing avatars synced to canned audio files of his show, to serve such a huge audience. (Fortnite peak user concurrency is a seriously insane 8 million+.)

Hat tip Forbe's Paul Tassi, who says this "has the potential to be a very cool, very unique moment in gaming, a live concert embedded in a game where millions attend in real-time." Millions of audience members are unique, and it's definitely cool, but far as real-time concerts by real world music stars in online games, we need to go back to ancient times (by which I mean 2006) and Suzanne Vega in Second Life:

Watch: Machine Learning Music Composed from Re-synthesized Fragments from 100s of Terabytes of LA Phil Recordings

Here's a new high def version of the dazzling 3D video/AI-driven performance displayed on the Walt Disney Concert Hall last year. Refik Anadol created the projected visuals, and the music was co-created by adaptive music/sound artist Robert Thomas, who as longtime New World Notes readers know, once experimented with voice-activated installations and location-reactive soundtracks in Second Life. (Disclosure: Also a pal.) Here's how Robert and his collaborators created the music for this event -- and by "collaborators", I'm including the machine learning algorithms they created to assist them, which searched through the LA Phil's massive archive of performances, merging disparate fragments of music together in new and novel ways: