Programme notes:

Bofan Ma's "that’s what they said" is composed for amplified quartet (violin, bass clarinet, electric guitar, violoncello) and multimedia (fixed & live). 

Jointly developed alongside Distractfold Ensemble in 2022, it is scored for four amplified performers (both playing their instruments and using their voices), as well as multimedia which consists of fixed audio-visual elements and live electronics.

The work manifests as an artistic statement concerning ‘deepfake’, both as a technological tool and as a ‘genre’. It explicitly places all five people involved in the process centre stage, including Ma himself and the four ensemble members. Incorporating AI generated or manipulated text, audio, and visuals, the work looks at ways by which words escape their meanings, and sounds detach from their origins. It is framed within a state of play where story-telling interacts with plausibility, and where fabricated speech becomes a form of musical discourse, eventually articulating an emergent latent space where lived experience consistently outweighs the automated, the generalised, and the stereotyped.

The work revolves around an active position-taking in the age of technology and (geo-) political instability. It is about re-embodying our own avatars, as well as listening to what’s not been said in the news. It is about encountering mis-representation. It is about resistance.

Composed for Distractfold Ensemble:

Linda Jankowska (violin/voice)

Rocío Bolanos (bass clarinet/voice)

Daniel Brew (electric guitar/voice)

Alice Purton (cello/voice)

The development and performance of the work feature uses of OpenAI GPT text-generating models, REFACE AI Face-swapping app, as well as the DDSP VST developed by the Google Magenta research team.

World Premiere at PRiSM Future Music #4 Festival,
Royal Northern College of Music,
Manchester.

25 October 2022

Copyright © Bofan Ma 2022

This work is supported by PRiSM, the Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music at the Royal Northern College of Music, funded by the Research England fund Expanding Excellence in England (E3).