Media

Media, including radio play, for A Walk to Meryton

The Attic : Staff Picks 
Dragoș Rusu & Victor Stutz (March 2024)

“North Vancouver-based composer Arne Eigenfeldt provides a compelling contrast to the all-too-pervasive narrative of “encroachment” around artificial intelligence in music. Having designed and employed his own generative/ real-time interactive music software since the 1980’s, he’s a veteran in this field and that’s the key to his more charitable outlook. The Double LP set A Walk to Meryton employs an an open-ended, modular AI scheme that he began developing around 2013, Musebots.”

Caught In the Net
Tomáš S. Polívka, Uloveno na síti: Jazzová pylová sezóna je tu, Jazz-Český rozhlas (March 2024)

“For some, AI is terrifying, for others it is a useful and necessary step in development. Canadian composer Arne Eigenfeldt has been working with interactive autonomous systems and creating so-called generative music for years. It is reported to be safe and inspiring. And that AI will not deprive him of his job and will not cheat “live” musicians out of business. As a co-author of music at the intersection of contemporary music, jazz, spoken word and electronic ambient, Eigenfeldt presents “MuseBots”, as he named his electronic “musical robots”. However, there is a human element in the recording. And the electronics generated by the machine match the inputs of jazz trumpeter and composer John Korsrud or saxophonist Jon Bentley (Seamus Blake, Kenny Wheeler) without any problems.”

AMN Reviews: Arne Eigenfeldt – A Walk to Meryton
Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News (March 2024)

“Canadian composer Arne Eigenfeldt’s AI-facilitated Walk to Meryton comes at a moment when questions about artificial intelligence’s effects on the art, both potentially positive and negative, are in the air. Eigenfeldt, who has been working with generative compositional software since the 1980s, comes down on the side of those artists for whom AI is a useful compositional tool rather than an existential threat…”

Music by machines
Taylor Lewis-Joseph, CBC GEM digi-Art (April 2023)

“Computers can inspire creativity, and you can even use their parts to produce some seriously unique sounds — as all those floppy-disk cover songs have shown us. But what happens when computers do the creative work themselves: composing, arranging and even performing?”

Music and Metacreation: An Interview with Arne Eigenfeldt
Gregory Taylor, Cycling74 (May 2020)

“He’s a Canadian composer who creates interactive and generative music systems that he refers to as “musical metacreation.” To put it another way, he creates agents that, working in community with other agents, create music. I’ve wanted to sit down and chat with him for a long time and to share his work with others, and the time presented itself….”

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Music
Christopher Taylor Jones, Words and Music (November 2017)
“Arne Eigenfeldt sees AI as a creativity booster, rather than a replacement for human creation.”

Play Nice: Musical Collisions Between Humans and Intelligent Machines
Lucas Lund, Discorder Magazine (August 2017) p. 10
“For millennia, humans have created music for humans to experience. But now, as computers are beginning to create music on their own, does it really make sense that humans are the ones that listen to it?”

Play Nice: Music by Humans & Intelligent Machines plays the sounds of the future
Alex Varty, Georgia Straight (July 2017)
“Looking for the future? Here’s a clue: this weekend, Vancouver’s first steel-framed skyscraper, the Dominion Building, will host a meeting between several cutting-edge artists and a small gang of freethinking musebots…”

Basking in Moments
Ian Bryce, SFU News (January 2017)
“If computers wrote music, what kind of music would they create and would it be good? These are questions Simon Fraser University School of Contemporary Arts professor Arne Eigenfeldt explores through his research in computer-generated music…”

Robotic trio make musical debut in Vancouver
The Early Edition, CBC News (August 2015)
“A band made up of a piano, a drum set and a marimba — and without any musicians — will debut in Vancouver on Monday night at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts….”

Robot musicians to jazz out
Michael Mui, 24 Hours Vancouver (August 2015)
“A robotic band created by a Simon Fraser University professor will be playing its tunes this coming Monday at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Vancouver. But they don’t really look like robots. What spectators can expect are three standalone instruments with attachments — linked to software that generates original music — that help them play…”

Vancouver Hosts Global Electronic Artists
Shawn Conner, Vancouver Sun (August 2015)
“Over 150 years after player pianos (and 200 years after music boxes) helped introduce the world to automated instruments, Simon Fraser University’s Arne Eigenfeldt and some colleagues are taking mechanical music-making to a whole new level…”

Can Science Help Brew the Perfect Pop Song?
Sophie Hall, Virgin.com (November 2014)
“Eigenfeldt’s project explored if a piece of music written by a computer could not only be actually good, but reflect human emotion, asking the question: “Can a computer be creative?” “Why can’t a computer – if it has been programmed and trained just like a person – be considered “a real artist?”…”

Arne Eigenfeldt puts the algo back in rhythm
Alex Varty, Musicworks (Spring 2014)
“There’s something mythic about the story of automated music, beginning with the very Biblical notion that the first robotic performers – the clockwork automatons of the thirteenth-century Persian inventor al-Jazari, who floated them in a boat for the amusement of royal drinking parties…”

Musical Chairs At An Electroacoustic Hyper Turning Point Ensemble Concert
Alex Waterhouse-Haywood  (May 2014)
“It was Eigenfeldt’s An Unnatural Selection (2014, World Premiere and commissioned by the TPE) which was the true cutting edge composition of the evening…”

Computer composer
Timothy Grier, Waterloo Chronicle (Spring 2013)
“No matter how much you applaud and cheer, don’t expect composer Arne Eigenfeldt’s musical partner to respond after a performance…”

Will Computational Creativity Lead to the End of Art?
Jacquelyn Strycker, The Strycker (September 2012)
If a computer composes a symphony, should the resulting musical piece be considered a work of art?

Write a String Quartet? There’s a Program for That
Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard (June 2012)
“Reboot, Beethoven: One group of Canadian concert-goers enjoyed computer-generated works as much as those written by humans…”

Musical Metacreation: Can A Computer Write A Song That Moves You?
Lucas Kavner, Huffington Post (June 2012)
“A player piano isn’t really impressive anymore, unless you’re a little kid seeing one for the first time, and then it’s kind of like magic. But imagine the piano is playing a song it wrote on its own. Does that change anything? What if you couldn’t tell the difference between songs the piano had written and ones that were written by a living, breathing human being?…”

Playing Guarde: Music Metacreation and the Vanguard
Alan Ranta, PopMatters (Feb 2012)
“The goal of metacreative artists is to endow computer programs with creative behaviors, to create computer algorithms that have the same ability to make artistic decisions within certain frameworks as human beings…”