MUSAI

The 1^st Music and Artificial Intelligence Festival MUSAI is coming to the Greek National Opera Alternative Stage at the SNFCC with the participation of fourteen Greek musicians and an international artist. For two days, on the 1^st and 2^nd June 2023, at 20.00, the audience will have the chance to enjoy artists from different musical worlds interacting with new technology and artificial intelligence tools and integrating them into musical creation, either in an improvisatory way, in real time, or as compositional tools.

In MUSAI Festival, acoustic instruments meet with electric sounds and live visuals, analog processors converse with motion and brain sign sensors, and the raw timbres of vocal idioms of the Eastern Mediterranean become musical digits in granular synthesis creations.

The Festival is realised thanks to a grant by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the scientific guidance of the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Workshop of the National Technical University of Athens and the LabMat of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, as well as the collaboration of the GNO Alternative Stage.

The first day of the Festival (1/6) opens with the prolific multi-instrumentalist and composer Tilemachos Moussas with an ambient-experimental programme and continues with experimental musicians Spyros Polychronopoulos on the electronics and Giannis Anastasakis on the guitar – accompanied by the live visuals of visual artist Natalia Manta –, followed by the Dance with Invisible Partners project by scientist and musician Kostis Gardikis with dark pop pieces co-created with the use of artificial intelligence.

The Festival’s second day brings onto the stage the synergy of researcher and performer Natalia Kotsani with Tasos Kofodimos singing and playing the lute, Harris Lambrakis on the ney, Giotis Kiourtsoglou on the electric bass and Vangelis Karipis on percussion, in a special musical encounter dedicated to the songs of the Mediterranean and the interaction of traditional vocal idioms with tools of granular synthesis. The Festival comes complete with the French singer and ethnomusicologist Françoise Atlan that has carved out a remarkable career thanks to her special timbre and the expressive style with which she approaches the Sephardic, Arabic and Andalusian repertoire.