Morten Qvenild – The HyPer(sonal) Piano Project
(2024)
author(s): Morten Qvenild
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
Towards a (per)sonal topography of
grand piano and electronics
How can I develop a grand piano with live electronics through iterated development loops in the cognitive technological environment of instrument, music, performance and my poetics?
The instrument I am developing, a grand piano with electronic augmentations, is adapted to cater my poetics. This adaptation of the instrument will change the way I compose. The change of composition will change the music. The change of music will change my performances. The change in performative needs will change the instrument, because it needs to do different things. This change in the instrument will show me other poetics and change my ideas. The change of ideas demands another music and another instrument, because the instrument should cater to my poetics. And so it goes… These are the development loops I am talking about.
I have made an augmented grand piano using various music technologies. I call the instrument the HyPer(sonal) Piano, a name derived from the suspected interagency between the extended instrument (HyPer), the personal (my poetics) and the sonal result (music and sound). I use old analogue guitar pedals and my own computer programming side by side, processing the original piano sound. I also take out control signals from the piano keys to drive different sound processes. The sound output of the instrument is deciding colors, patterns and density on a 1x3 meter LED light carpet attached to the grand piano. I sing, yet the sound of my voice is heavily processed, a processing decided by what I am playing on the keys. All sound sources and control signal sources are interconnected, allowing for complex and sometimes incomprehensible situations in the instrument´s mechanisms.
Credits:
First supervisor: Henrik Hellstenius
Second Supervisors: Øyvind Brandtsegg and Eivind Buene
Cover photo by Jørn Stenersen, www.anamorphiclofi.com
All other photo, audio and video recording/editing by Morten Qvenild, unless stated.
Between Data and Breath: Machine Learning, Musical Embodiment and the Emergence of Voice
(last edited: 2026)
author(s): Jonathan Reus
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From vocal deepfakes to artificial voice actors and pop star avatars, data-driven machine learning has intensified embodied, musical, and social complexities of voice. While disembodiment and decontextualisation of voice have been musical concerns since the invention of sound recording, AI voice synthesis accelerates these processes and adds new perceptual, cognitive, and social layers.
Many ontologies from voice studies imagine voice as resisting fixity, yet in today’s technological climate this resistance may be losing its ontological imperative. Voice is in transformation - possibly crisis - requiring both curiosity and care in paradoxical tension. These changes also unfold within a technological arms race for innovation, profit, and global AI supremacy. Artists are not only early adopters, but experimentalists and bards who participate in the narratives around AI and vocality.
This thesis evaluates the changing vocal condition through first-person artistic research with AI voice technologies, exploring their poetics and potentials in three artworks created between 2021–2025. In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit was a year-long generative radio broadcast exploring machine learning as a intergenerational vocal memory. iː ɡoʊ weɪ is a hybrid extended voice performance practice using real-time voice transfer to unravel vocal identity on stage. DadaSets investigates the invisibilized vocal labour of AI voice through collaborations with artists, new scoring systems, the absurdist dataset-making performance Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk, and the invention of the voice synthesis instrument Tungnaá.
These works are analyzed through an interdisciplinary lens: experimental vocal traditions and the embodied musical-technological ethos of STEIM, alongside philosophies of voice, cognitive neuroscience, and material anthropology; while predictive coding theory frames compositional notions of uncanny, pathological and convivial technologisations of voice. Voice data emerges as paradoxical - both disembodied and relational, material and emergent, gift and commodity - functioning as the basis for musical animacy and collaboration within a rapidly changing socio-technical landscape.
The Data-driven Voice-Body in Performance: AI Voices as Materials, Mediators, and Gifts
(last edited: 2026)
author(s): JC Reus
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Data-driven, realistic and identity-bearing AI voice technologies have been proliferating widely in recent years. Voice, a multiply embodied phenomenon situated within and across human bodies in space, is deeply disrupted by the disembodying tendencies of AI voice technologies and their processes of data creation and collection, resulting in the need for a re-evaluation of perceptual, cognitive and cultural factors. This paper addresses this need by synthesizing ideas from embodied cognition, voice studies, and material anthropology to analyze real-time, AI-mediated voice as a form of embodied cognition that is an enactive, intersubjective, extended, materially and socially distributed phenomenon. We examine AI-mediated voice through the case study of the live music performance iː ɡoʊ weɪ, which uses real-time AI voice transfer systems trained on carefully curated vocal datasets that represent diverse forms of vocal alterity relations. The live performance system integrates custom RAVE models within a SuperCollider environment, enabling dynamic real-time transformation of the performer's voice through a tactile control interface. This technical architecture facilitates immediate feedback loops between biological vocalization, AI processing, and auditory perception. The domain of audience perception becomes a key point of reflection, where the formation of new perceptions of voice and body is repeatedly challenged by the fluid voice-body gestalt of the performer, a process of donning vocal masks that modulate perceptual dissonances and resolutions. We further address the complex situation of voice AI through the concept of identity-bearing technologies, which leverages theories from voice studies, speech science, material anthropology and embodied cognition that address identity perception. Finally, we address the key ethical dilemmas of such systems, particularly as they relate to the problem of designing technologies that reproduce the illusion of a singular essential vocal identity. We respond to the problem of the representation of vocal bodies through a speculative framework of the vocal gift, analyzing how gift relationships are at play within the creation of the AI systems of iː ɡoʊ weɪ, and suggesting further directions for research into developing technological systems that honor gift relationships as a fundamental principle for ethical design of AI voice technologies.
How to Do Things with Performance? Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Annette Arlander, Tero Nauha, Hanna Järvinen, Pilvi Porkola
connected to: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is the website and the open archive of the four-year research project HOW TO DO THINGS WITH PERFORMANCE? funded by the Finnish Academy.
Nämä ovat nelivuotisen Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman tutkimushankkeen MITEN TEHDÄ ASIOITA ESITYKSELLÄ? verkkosivut ja avoin arkisto.
Performative paradigm for businesses
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Lorena Croceri
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Performative Paradigm for Businesses
Reconfiguring Strategy, Presence and Creative Leadership
This article introduces the Performative Paradigm as an innovative framework for business development, leadership and strategic positioning. Moving beyond traditional rational models, the performative approach integrates embodiment, narrative, and emotional architecture into the very core of professional structures.
Rather than separating personal presence from strategic decision-making, this paradigm understands the body, desire, and symbolic expression as essential tools for navigating uncertainty and generating sustainable innovation. Drawing from performance studies, psychoanalytic thinking, and affect theory, the article explores how performative logic can be applied to projects, teams, and leadership styles—especially within multidisciplinary or creative industries.
Far from being abstract, the paradigm proposes concrete methodologies and real cases where performative alignment has shifted business dynamics: from burnout to embodied clarity, from fragmentation to integrated vision. Aimed at entrepreneurs, consultants, and visionary leaders, this article opens a liminal path where doing and being converge.
Propaganda Art from the 20th to the 21st Century
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Jonas Staal
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This study by artist Jonas Staal explores the development of propaganda art from the 20th to the 21st century.
Staal defines propaganda as the performance of power by means of the equation propaganda = power + performance. Through his work as a propaganda researcher and practice as a propaganda artist, he argues that different structures of power generate different forms of propaganda and therefore different forms of propaganda art.
Whereas in the context of the 20th century Staal discusses the differences between avant-garde, totalitarian, and modernist propaganda art, in the 21st century he proposes the categories of War on Terror Propaganda Art, Popular Propaganda Art, and Stateless Propaganda Art. By means of concrete examples of artists and artworks within each of these categories, he attempts to show how the performance of power in the 21st century translates into different visual forms, and how they shape and direct our reality.
Staal’s study shows that power and art exist in continuous interaction. Propaganda and propaganda art are not terms that only refer to the past, but concepts and practices through which we can understand the construction of reality in the present.
This is the website and the open archive of the four-year research project HOW TO DO THINGS WITH PERFORMANCE? funded by the Finnish Academy. Nämä ovat nelivuotisen Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman tutkimushankkeen MITEN TEHDÄ ASIOITA ESITYKSELLÄ? verkkosivut ja avoin arkisto.open exposition comments (0)