Hybrid Music Lab

MOO-SiC is a live coded musical performance, which will take place in a text-based virtual reality environment built in the audio-programming language SuperCollider. The virtual space will be described in text, as will actions by performers or audience members in the space. Live and remote audience members will be able to interact in the text based VR environment.
The text based VR, called a MOO, was invented in the 1990s; it consumes few resources and can be made to work with screen readers. As a low-resource project, it is a degrowth tele presence, accessible to users of older hardware, people with slow connections and self- hosters.
The use of text description creates a more detailed and robust improvisatory environment than the limited visual language of graphical VR and the metaverse. Text descriptions create images in the viewer’s minds, (rather than as a prompt to a generative AI) and engage imagination and creativity. The music will be a live-generated sound track to the virtual space.

Relativity is a developing 4-channel spatial sound performance investigating the transformation of environmental recordings through hybrid analog and digital processing systems.
The work originates from a glacial expedition with the Icelandic Glaciological Society on Vatnajökull, Iceland, where hydrophones, geophones, contact microphones and environmental recording techniques were used to capture acoustic traces of glacial activity, which were then transformed through a live processing system.
Inspired by scientific sensing methods including Radio Echo Sounding (RES), seismic monitoring, and glaciological measurement techniques, Relativity explores the relationship between environmental sensing and musical production.
The performance outcome is a 4-channel spatial composition that uses multichannel diffusion to create an immersive listening environment.

Void is a browser-based audiovisual performance that explores the relationship between collective and individual perception. By scanning a QR code, participants access a web application that transforms their mobile devices into audiovisual elements controlled in real time by the performer.
The work addresses a contemporary paradox: technologies designed to connect people increasingly shape individual perceptual spaces. Void reconfigures this condition by combining a common acoustic environment with distributed audiovisual events generated on personal devices. Each participant contributes to the performance while experiencing a unique perspective, creating a constantly shifting dialogue between public and private space, presence and isolation, individual experience and collective listening.
Void proposes an artistic reflection on how everyday digital devices shape the contemporary social experience and how they can be temporarily reimagined as part of a shared performative environment.

Folded Bodies is a live audiovisual performance for two humans and two artificial nervous systems.
In this new version, created for MW:M, two instances are networked into a quartet — two performers, two nervous systems. Each body is rendered on its own projector — two organisms, two screens, two voices — and spikes from each network cross the wire to stimulate the other. Each machine becomes the other’s environment. The performers fold, tune, and perturb, but never fully control: the performance is a four-way negotiation of attention, in which humans relate to their own instruments, to each other’s, and to each other through machines that are also negotiating with each other.

The session will involve a live demonstration of Opto-Sonic:Cube, an electronic musical instrument based on Visible Light Communication (VLC). The instrument transmits oscillator signals by modulating LED light and reproduces them through a solar-cell receiver using optical demodulation. The performance will be achieved by freely arranging and combining transparent cubes, each mounted an oscillator that generates one of four waveforms: sine, square, sawtooth, or white noise.
Rather than eliminating signal interference and interruption, Opto-Sonic:Cube embraces them as expressive musical elements, reinterpreting visible light communication as a performative musical interface. Because light functions simultaneously as both the interaction medium and the sound source, the spatial arrangement and overlap of light directly shape the resulting sound. This will create a performance experience in which visual and auditory perception will be tightly integrated.

The visual interfaces of digital audio can exclude blind and partially sighted (BPS) producers and current speech feedback tools compete directly with the sound being shaped. This session presents two haptic prototype interfaces, co-designed with BPS practitioners, and demonstrated live by a blind sound professional, that deliver real-time audio information through touch. Attendees will try the interfaces themselves and experience what inclusive haptic music production technology can really feel like.

‘Faulty Oracle’ is an adaptive audiovisual installation that conjures a gloriously unreliable divinatory machine. Visitors pose questions through body language which the system interprets and wilfully transforms. The dialogue is a masterclass in miscommunication and the oracle becomes a mirror of ambiguity, where meaning emerges from (mis)interpretation rather than clarity.
By shifting interaction from language to the body, ‘Faulty Oracle’ gleefully dismantles any expectation of precision in human-machine exchange. ‘Faulty Oracle’ is built around real-time AI image generation and responsive sound. A motion-tracking system reads the visitor’s physical presence within the space and uses it to steer both the evolving video and the musical behaviour of the work. On screen, AI-generated imagery is continuously produced, as though the oracle were searching for a language.
The sound is equally reactive: voices and musical textures are shaped by the visitor’s physical inquiry. The piece can be presented in stereo or expanded into optional multichannel diffusion, allowing the oracle’s answers to inhabit the room more fully and spill into the space around passers-by.

This session explores current tendencies of the evolving field of Quantum Music and what this offers artistically to creators and beyond. It includes an introductory opening to the creative possibilities of Quantum Arts, an overview of the pathways into current and emerging concepts and tools, as well as a performance of a current piece of the technology for artists.

We’re seeing a significant increase in AI-made content across the internet. On some music streaming platforms, more than 40% of newly uploaded songs are now AI-generated. At the same time, research suggests that in Germany alone, more than 500,000 children may not have access to music lessons within the next ten years.
Many believe that AI is an incredible technology that can augment and transform music education when used correctly. This session will demonstrate how AI can be used to teach music interactively, through machine learning software models that analyse songs and the music theory behind them.
The session will show how AI can act as a personal coach that explains concepts, answers questions, and adapts to each learner’s language and needs.
The aim is to make the machine learning software and its core technology available to everyone: giving teachers tools to make learning more effective, while helping individuals overcome barriers and continue learning.

Welcome to this year’s Hybrid Music Lab: our first edition featuring a shared exhibition space alongside demos, performances, and installations. Here, everything is tangible, hands-on, and open to exploration.

Dive in, experiment and experience music, sound and technology coming together in an inspiring, playful environment of discovery and collaboration.