Meet this year's guest instructors for BauSongs
6. nov. 2024
From November 18th to 22nd, the songwriting camp BauSongs will take place in Berlin. Here, Danish and Berlin-based musicians come together to be challenged and inspired to create new music. Read on to learn more about this year's two guest instructors at BauSongs: Portrait XO and Lyra Pramuk.
Portrait XO
Portrait XO (she/they) is an award-winning multimodal artist and independent researcher. She conducts research on collaborations between humans and machines, exploring new formats and how art and sound can be used in different ways. In her work, she investigates societal biases, speculative attitudes toward AI, and critiques the impact of AI on creativity, identity, and underrepresented cultures.
Portrait XO's AI debut album WIRE (2022) was created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence's "other self." The AI processed an hour of unreleased songs to generate ten hours of new sounds and melodies. Portrait XO then worked to extract fragments to create the tracks for the album – a process she refers to as "neural vocal duets." The album critiques AI's biases and its impact on creativity and identity.
Portrait XO says:“I started off by curating samples that made melodic sense, and wired words together I found interesting. I questioned whether or not AI generated music could be emotive or robotic. In the end, it was deeply emotive because hearing a machine sing like me was creepy, fascinating, and inspiring at the same time.”
LYRA PRAMUK
Lyra Pramuk is a vocalist, composer, and performance artist based in Berlin.
Her work fuses classical vocals, pop sensibilities, performative practices, and contemporary club culture into something that can best be described as futuristic folk music.
According to her, the music encapsulates the deeply rooted human urge to express our innermost, primitive emotions. Lyra holds a bachelor's degree in Voice Performance and uses technology to expand the human voice as an object with limitless possibilities.
Recent works include her debut album Fountain and the subsequent conceptual remix album Delta.
Lyra has performed at prominent festivals and venues across the EU and the US, and regularly receives commissions for instrumental compositions, film scores, and sound installations.
Read more about BauSongs here.
Read our interview with a former participant, as well as GRETA (instructor), here.
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BauSongs is organized by Greta Schenk, Kaspar Kaae, and Michael Møller in collaboration with Musicboard Berlin and ROSA.
BauSongs is supported by DPA/KODA Kultur and the Danish Arts Foundation.
BauSongs was founded in 2022 as part of the NEUSTART initiative.
