British soul singer Hannah Williams will join forces with the Riot Ensemble quartet to premiere British composer Benjamin Oliver’s AI-generated song cycle LOVE LETTERS at Kings Place in London on Wednesdsay, July 19th.
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea will guest for three vocal pieces.
LOVE LETTERS includes melancholic, absurd and dramatic expressions of love made with LovelaceGPT, a new AI text generation model developed by University of Southampton researchers.
Benjamin Oliver said: "Last year, I approached Hannah Williams to collaborate on a song cycle and then boom, ChatGPT landed. After experimenting a little, I found the generic quality of the content generated by Chat-GPT frustrating. I secured funding from the University of Southampton Web Science Institute to form a new research team, including literature professor Will May and AI expert Dr Shoaib Jameel.
"We developed LovelaceGPT, which creates first-person love texts. I've been setting these texts to music for Hannah to perform, accompanied by a quartet of keyboardists and percussionists from Riot Ensemble. While the texts may not always make sense (to say the least), it has been exciting to find unconventional musical materials that bring them to life in my new work LOVE LETTERS."
The LOVE LETTERS song cycle will later feature on ‘Too Many Sweets’, Benjamin Oliver’s first portrait album, due for release by Birmingham Record Company in April 2024.
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea will guest for three vocal pieces.
LOVE LETTERS includes melancholic, absurd and dramatic expressions of love made with LovelaceGPT, a new AI text generation model developed by University of Southampton researchers.
"We developed LovelaceGPT, which creates first-person love texts. I've been setting these texts to music for Hannah to perform, accompanied by a quartet of keyboardists and percussionists from Riot Ensemble. While the texts may not always make sense (to say the least), it has been exciting to find unconventional musical materials that bring them to life in my new work LOVE LETTERS."
The LOVE LETTERS song cycle will later feature on ‘Too Many Sweets’, Benjamin Oliver’s first portrait album, due for release by Birmingham Record Company in April 2024.
For tickets and details go to kingsplace.co.uk.