AI-Assisted Premiere at the Boston Symphony Orchestra

"already and not yet", a new classical piece by composer and MIT Media Lab faculty director Tod Machover, is premiering on Thursday with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Conducted by Kent Nagano, the performance also features an AI system on stage that listens to musicians through microphones and projects its own generated sounds through a surround sound system.

Composer Tod Machover stated that he is aware many people view artificial intelligence as an existential threat, yet he is bringing this technology to the same stage as one of the world's most successful classical music ensembles. In the piece titled "already and not yet", premiering on Thursday with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the AI system will improvise and add its own music while the musicians perform. Part of the orchestra's program week themed "Technology and Our Humanity", the piece will continue to be performed through Saturday.

Manaswi Mishra, the MIT Media Lab PhD researcher who designed the system, explained that if no external sound enters the system, no sound will be output either. Machover and Mishra noted that the system is designed to make variations on incoming sounds or establish connections between different parts of the incoming audio. During the performance, Mishra will control the AI on stage, while master's student Ana Schon will handle the concert hall sound mixing.