Performed by Darragh Morgan

Commissioned by Music Current/Dublin Sound Lab

Music Current Festival, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin

9 November 2021

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This work attempts to re-embody the output of a machine learning system that has been trained on music for violin. The performer becomes a nexus for seemingly contrasting technologies: notation, the body, and machine learning neural synthesis. A potential skeuomorph of the biological and the digital, Self-Attention instead treats technology as the external organs of the body, blurring the lines between subject and object.

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Combing through the output of a neural network trained on violin music, a couple of musical fragments and gestures jumped out at me. And the thought can one call something the neural net generates a gesture, if it has no concept of an embodied technique and practice? Maybe such gestures originate in the music it was trained on, but maybe not. And does it even matter? So Self-Attention seeks to re-embody this music. Tuning disparities in the piece may underline the distinction between the embodied and the disembodied. Maybe they’re just character quirks.