I began contemplating how this idea might translate into the musical context: Alexa, Write Me Some Music is the result. Composed for solo cello & electronics, the work was commissioned for performance by Nick Photinos (Eighth Blackbird) as part of my Composition Fellowship with Dots+Loops (2020-2021, Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia). Nick instructs Alexa, his trusty mobile-phone AI assistant, to compose him some sight-reading for a regular practice session. Alexa complies, supplying a randomly-generated series of increasingly difficult passages…and punctuating said passages with suspiciously targeted advertisements. As the ads get progressively longer, the passages of sight-reading get proportionally shorter; in the final passage, only one note is played before the system fires up its commercial content. After each advertisement, Nick is prompted to repeat a specific key-phrase in order to continue onto his next cello passage. At this point, Alexa insults Nick for his lack of practice diligence, and suggests that he give up altogether. She then commands herself to play some music “from a cellist who didn’t quit their practices early,” and begins streaming Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1.

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Alexa, Write Me Some Music lies at the intersection of contemporary instrumental practice and performance-art; the solo cellist is required to act out the narrative scenario which structures the work while also proceeding through a series of increasingly convoluted instrumental passages. Alexa problematises distinctions between public and private experiences of music. The rehearsal space is typically one encountered alone or perhaps with an instructor – the same is true of the innumerable interactions we each have on a daily basis with our personal smart-devices. This inversion of the social context in which music is practiced (quite literally) is extended to a dialogue around the nature of virtuosity: for the cellist performing Alexa, the theatrical aspect is that rehearsed in advance, whereas the notes themselves become the unprepared element, the unknown quantity. This tension between performance and rehearsal is then itself juxtaposed against the unwelcome injunctions of the incessant advertisements, each of which works successively more overtly to disconcert the performer’s own musicality. Constant commercial incursion is an overwhelmingly familiar aspect of twenty-first century experience; here even an informal musical ritual is thus commodified. The advertisements are self-evidently satirical. Or are they? Their impertinent undertones and unscrupulous methods of persuasion could plausibly have been borrowed from the world of the “real” Alexa. The piece converges at the moment when Alexa wrests control altogether from the cellist. Demarcations between the real and the imaginary; the public and the private; the human and the humanoid; have become uncomfortably porous. But that’s ok – it’s just make-believe, right? Right?

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Alexa, Write Me Some Music is programmed entirely in JavaScript, using the p5.js framework (the JavaScript fork of the Processing language) and its affiliated p5.Sound, p5.Speech and ML5 (machine-learning) libraries. The speech recognition and speech synthesis rely heavily on the Google Web API for speech. Credits for specific code and examples are given in the source code, available at the bottom of this page. A browser-hosted version of the project is currently being developed (watch this space!), however recent updates to Google’s Web API have complicated this implementation. All multimedia material used in Alexa is either my own, taken from Creative Commons 0 libraries, or is credited in the code.