Envelope Follower 8 channel audio performance using a Buchla 200 synthesiser, AI-generated voice clones, antique music boxes
Composed and performed by Joel Stern Music Box Operators: James Parker, Debris Facility, James Rushford
Commissioned by Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) for Sonorous 10, at Melbourne Recital Centre.
Introduction
Thank you to melbourne electronic sound studio for the huge privilege and opportunity to create this piece. I'll play for about 30 minutes in total. The work is organised into three movements. Throughout the whole thing you’ll hear the Bookla 200 synthesizer. For those who've spent time with it, you'll know its less like a single instrument and more a system for shaping electronic sound in nearly infinite ways. The opening and closing sections will set the Bookla in dialogue with a chorus of ‘voices’ I generated using an artificial intelligence process called cloning. A voice clone is essentially a synthetic copy of a human voice, trained on the acoustic qualities of the voice it is replicating which are draped like a skin over the underlying structure of a large language model. Sometimes you'll hear the voices control the synthesizer, and sometimes the other way around. AI voices are of course, in their own way, synthesizers—artificial, digital apparitions, so there’s a nice tangle there. In the middle section, I’ll invite three collaborators—James Rushford, James Parker, and Debris Facility—to join me to operate some 19th-century hand-cranked music boxes, which will trigger the Bookla. Something I wanted to do in this work is hold together different forms and eras of automation and synthesis, from 19th-century musical automata to 20th-century analog synthesizers, to 21st-century AI-generated sound. One final note: these last few weeks—and this year, really—have been politically confronting in many ways, with Trump’s re-election - which felt like a gut punch - and the ongoing trauma of the unspeakable violence in Palestine and Lebanon. Like many, I’ve been protesting, and at times, it’s been hard to reconcile making art and music with such overwhelming harm in the world. While this piece isn’t explicitly political, it is marked by a sense of intense political unease—and a feeling that words and language sometimes dissolve in the face of such enormity.