Commissioned and performed by Crash Ensemble, with funds from the Arts Council of Ireland 2020

Smock Alley Theatre, New Music Dublin 2021

24 April 2021

Neural synthesis by Dadabots, AI video elements by James Kelleher

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deep model A type of neural network containing multiple hidden layers.
model worker An exemplary, productive labourer. Also udarnik, shock worker, Stakhanovite etc. Common in Communist states.

DEEP MODEL WORKER is a radical journey through the underbelly of artificial intelligence, centring labour and the increasing augmentation of human life and art. In it:

~Crash Ensemble duet with their AI counterparts, birthed from a neural network trained on the CrashLands album. That record’s copyrighted original work by contemporary composers is reimagined here, not as direct samples, but entirely new audio produced by the neural network’s unsupervised deep learning.

~~AI-generated images of people that ‘do not exist’, authentic fake subjects, dream in hyperreality.

~~~Real-world characters working in tech, soon to be replaced entirely by AI, speak of their precarious role in the mode of production.

~~~~AI replacements for supermarket labour express sympathy with their dwindling human coworkers.

Deep Model Worker

Lacan reflects on his love for Justine, a German Boxer, named after the de Sade novel.

Performed by Sarah Watts and Jon Iles
Released on the Feed the Hound record, published by Cullin Sound, June 18th 2021

Ms Justine

Performed by Darragh Morgan
Commissioned by Music Current 2021
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
9 November 2021

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This work attempts to re-embody the output of a machine learning system that has been trained on music for violin. The performer becomes a nexus for seemingly contrasting technologies: notation, the body, and machine learning neural synthesis. A potential skeuomorph of the biological and the digital, Self-Attention instead treats technology as the external organs of the body, blurring the lines between subject and object.

Combing through the output of a neural network trained on violin music, a couple of musical fragments and gestures jumped out at me. And the thought can one call something the neural net generates a gesture, if it has no concept of an embodied technique and practice? Maybe such gestures originate in the music it was trained on, but maybe not. And does it even matter? So Self-Attention seeks to re-embody this music. Tuning disparities in the piece may underline the distinction between the embodied and the disembodied. Maybe they’re just character quirks.

Self-Attention

Accordion by Dermot Dunne
Film by Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair
Text generation by Darragh Kelly
Starring Hannah Mamalis
Film available to view here: https://www.darragh-kelly.com/penelope

Commissioned by Contemporary Music Centre and Centre Culturel Irlandais, with support from the Irish Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Decade of Centenaries 2012–2023 programme, One Dublin One Book 2022 through funding from Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin City Council, and New Music Dublin 2022.

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A woman soliloquizes. Previously unknown yet familiar vocabularies—augmented, autonomous, coded—spring forth to be worshipped. Her words constitute a revealed text, an original facsimile, that knows no bounds.

Text by OpenAI: GPT-2 Trained on Molly's Soliloquy from Ulysses by James Joyce.

Penelope premiered in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais and Dublin at the Irish Film Institute on Feb 2 2022. It will be screened in Dublin for New Music Dublin in April, and again in Paris and Budapest in June 2022 for Bloomsday.

Penelope

Performed by Psappha Ensemble (Ben Powell)
Commissioned by Psappha Ensemble
Hallé St Peter's, Manchester
19 May 2022

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Discrete Features is an intuitive, rapt piece that unconsciously chants something to itself under its breath. A hyperreal, elemental tonality and sympathetic resonances, emerging from a combination of the sostenuto and sustain pedals, create a kind of unsettled finitude. Its bare octave melodies and askew ornamentation add up to a piece that takes being unserious very seriously.

Discrete Features

This work was inspired by the sometimes fractious relationship between composer, conductor, and orchestra. And canonic, pedagogic orchestration technique.

Beginning life as a piece intended to be littered with various orchestration mistakes and faux pas, it came to focus on just one: the page turn, both as an action in itself and its position in players’ parts. The work’s opening section involves the orchestra turning pages of the score, recalling an industrial soundscape or factory floor, while the main section contains increasingly awkward page turns inserted into certain players’ parts, but not the full score. Such strategies result in a heightening of the disunity and tension between conductor and orchestra. Musically, the work recoils from orchestral clarity and formal teleology, opting instead for a murky, muddy soup.

The Art Of Skillful Orchestration, 11th Ed.

picc, fl, alto fl, alto fl, bass fl

The work takes its inspiration from The Magic Flute, Freemasonry, and Beckett’s Come and Go.

Beneficence

Darragh Kelly is a composer and musician. He is interested in the ineluctable dialectics of the virtual vs the actual, subject vs object, the bathetic, the ecstatic, new music's ageing, and tonality's afterlife. Recent work makes use of AI, seeking to re-embody the output of neural networks and treat these systems as external organs of the body—a body in excess.​

Collaborators and performers have included Crash Ensemble, Heather Roche, The Smith Quartet, Darragh Morgan, Peter Brötzmann, Psappha Ensemble, Carla Rees, Michelle O'Rourke, and Elizabeth Hilliard. He received the 2018 West Cork Music Composition Prize for his work for string quartet, Blue, partly based upon the film by Derek Jarman. He is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre. In 2021, he received the Arts Council of Ireland Music Bursary, funding research and training in machine learning and a forthcoming collaboration with Irish composer and musician James McIlwrath. He has recently been awarded the Arts Council Next Generation Award for 2022, receiving €25,000 to support his work and research.

Darragh was a committee member for the Irish Composers' Collective for three years. He has studied at Trinity College Dublin and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.

Darragh Kelly

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