Brigitte Muntendorf at the Biennale Musica – a piece for voices created with the help of artificial intelligence.

“My work is not easy, you listen to it not for entertainment, but to understand what is happening in the world, and I am curious whether the audience will stick it out until the end.” Orbit – a series about war is a new opera by German-Austrian composer Brigitte Muntendorff, which will have its world premiere at the Venice Music Biennale on October 22. Posthuman futuristic oratory consisting of disembodied voices that sing, speak and whisper. And also, right from the title, a powerful work on war that is even more sadly relevant today. “Inspiration is Military series, 150 images of Nancy Spero, American artist and political activist, dedicated to the Vietnam War. This is where aesthetic proposals were born, for example, from a goddess who arches her back in an arch, I came up with the idea for the design of the speakers. There are 32 of them, located in two circles above the audience, who are thus surrounded by music at different heights.”

At the thematic level, the link is even more obvious: Spero describes the violence of war, which in her feminist vision is always close to violence between the sexes. “More precisely, it is a war against the female body. I wanted to explore and try to understand why this is a constant in history, present even in very different societies. I then moved on to other related topics such as abortion in the US and Poland. Again, the instrumental use of rape in wars, which is a way of exploding the social fabric from within. And the drama of women in Iran, where girls as young as 16 are killed for not wearing the veil.”

Different points of view require different voices, and for this reason Münterdorff used artificial intelligence: “I started with the question: is it possible to compose music for the theater without having singers on stage? The result was an oratorio for singers cloned using AI. There are no live performers, no recorded voices, all created using Respeecher – software created by a Ukrainian startup.” Introduced in 2018, it is already widely used in music, films and TV programs such as The Mandalorian, Boba Fett’s Book AND Obi-Wan Kenobi. Thanks to Respeecher’s artificial intelligence, the original voice can be recognized, synthetically cloned, and then activated with another voice.

“I used my voice, tried to imitate the voice of other singers, came up with others: there are about twenty of them in total.” Grimes has opera, as well as soul and pop: “He provided a tool to clone his voice, and I thought it would be interesting to use because of his background, which is completely different from mine. In another section on abortion in Poland, I quoted Billie Eilish: I want to ensure that violence against women does not remain a problem for a few, it needs to reach as wide an audience as possible, and this requires the contribution of everyone. ”

In the age of generative AI, this is a job in which artificial intelligence does not play a creative role: “I decided not to trust the creative part of AI because I didn’t have a positive experience when I tried it in other cases. Indeed, there is a creation, but it is a creation of tone that begins with the text, even if I then created the characteristics of the various characters with my voice.”

So is artificial intelligence an aesthetic choice? “Not only. First of all, I didn’t want the voices to relate to the body, then there is the question of answering the theme of the story. Orbit it’s about monstrosity, and I wanted—to quote Derrida—something that would manifest monstrosity, and in a certain sense these artificial voices are monstrous. Sometimes I had to add artifacts to make them sound artificial again, I want the audience to remember that they are not real. They are machines, and so they go beyond shame: they manage to do things that we as humans as a society seem not to want to do, or that we are very slow to do.”

There is another sound element that characterizes Orbit, and this is the sound of a melting iceberg: “We are destroying the environment, we literally have no soil under our feet. For me, this process corresponds to violence against the female element: to destroy women means to destroy the Earth. The sound of the iceberg was provided by the Pacific Maritime Institute and other scientists who study it, it is very loud, heavy, dark: whales use it to understand which areas to avoid because the water may be too cold for them.”

The sound of an iceberg, like voices, floats, or rather rotates in orbit in space. Thanks to a system created by the German d&b audiotechnik, which allows you to place up to 64 sound objects in space and control them with high precision. In pop music, Björk uses it live, and the idea is the same: to question frontal listening, to the right and left of the stereo, but also to involve the audience more, creating the impression that sounds materialize at points, precise settings of space. , no matter where the speakers are located. “I was originally thinking of a situation where listeners could move, but given the theme Orbit I think a more concentrated, concert listening experience is preferable.” For Brigitte Muntendorf, listening is itself a political act: “The opening is an excerpt from Christina Lamb, the Times war correspondent in Ukraine and Afghanistan. It comes from one speaker, everyone gathered together to hear his very harsh story.” But 55 minutes Orbit – Military series can they really change, if not the world, then at least the way we see it? “I wanted to not just testify, but ask questions. What is my position? What can I do? And How? I don’t think art can change the world, historically it has never happened, but it can create a parallel world to reflect and expand our perspectives. From this work, from the testimonies of many voices who lived through this, I learned a lot and want to share it through music.”