Maria CHOIR

Maria CHOIR is an experimental work based on the collective training of a synthetic model of her own voice in a choral format. It is an interactive installation in which a synthetic reproduction of Maria Arnal's voice harmonises in real time what the visitor sings, creating a hybrid human-digital choir that evolves over time. In addition, visitors can record their voice to help train an AI model to create a new collective synthetic voice that will produce a piece of music.

In a safe dark space, a center-based transparent plinth lets the visitor see the inner architecture of the installation, where the computers, the sound interfaces and the cables are located and lighted to be seen. Four speakers surround the visitors to embrace them with all the sounds displayed. On a screen, an AI-animated avatar leads the visitor through the whole experience, while reacting and transforming with their voice in real time.

Maria CHOIR is an artistic experimental approach to modeling voices, not interested in automated singing or deep fake voice impersonation, but in generative musical human-AI interaction. On the edge of a sound installation, an interactive fun musical game and an experiment on consent and training collective voice models, this AI-artwork aims to create and reflect on speculative ways of singing and listening, co-creating songs and textures with a merger of synthetic and physical bodies. Thus, the work explores new narratives of what a voice can be in the 21st century.

As a complementary activation of the installation, Maria Arnal also presents a series of live performative lectures, sonic meditations in which she combines the voice with the synthetic clones, a synthetic choir and invites the audience to sing with them in a collective improvisation. These performances are specifically designed to explain how the models have been trained, offering new insights into the black boxes of AI models, and are an invitation to listen to various materials discarded during the research process.

Two of these lectures were held at the CCCB: the first on 24th November 2023 as part of the AI and Music series, and the second, adapted for a secondary school audience, on 11th January 2024 as part of the ALIA project.

Maria Arnal is one of the most renowned voices on the contemporary music scene. Trained in translation, performing arts, anthropology and singing, she develops her musical work through passionate experimentation with archives and digitised sound libraries of field recordings.

Maria CHOIR is a work by Maria Arnal, with visuals created by JP Bonino, programmed and designed by the studio axolot.cat, Iván Paz and Lina Bautista, with the collaboration of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) and the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), with funding from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT).  It was presented at the CCCB as part of the exhibition AI: Artificial Intelligence from 18 October 2023 to 17 March 2024.