About two weeks ago, Huawei finally finished a new project they collaborated with Kjetil Skogli, Mark Sayfritz and James Shearman. Promptly called as the Sound of Light symphony, the orchestra piece was made possible through the use of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro‘s AI to capture the sound of the Northern Lights. So how did they do it?
According to the video trailer below, it took them a month to do this. First, Kjetil was tasked to capture the Northern Lights in Norway then transfer the photos back to the laboratory, where the professional music composer, Mark worked with the Mate 20 Pro’s custom-built AI system to recognise the soundwave then transpose them into musical elements. After that, James, who is a music conductor began to piece the sound together which would then be used to compose the symphony. Finally, the orchestra’s final challenge was to create a multi-sensory experience to juxtapose with the sound.
The composer, Mark Sayfritz remarked,
“Introducing artificial intelligence into my music has opened up a whole new range of creative possibilities. I can now feed footage of the Northern Lights into an AI system which analyses things such as colour, size, shape and speed. It then generates variations of my musical phrases, based upon what it sees. Therefore, when the AI recognises a particularly dramatic light show, it can modulate the sounds to reflect that intensity in the composition. I can then incorporate those elements into the symphony.”
The video of the live audio-visual AI-influenced performance that kicked off in the Brahms Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria on November 28 can be viewed on YouTube. Over 300 spectators attended it and witnessed the orchestra piece which was conducted by James Shearman and performed by the Synchron Stage Orchestra.
(starts at the 30-minute mark)
So what do you think of the music? Well, I guess it’s a start and it’s interesting to see where it will go from there. Until then, stay tuned for more Huawei news at TechNave.com.
