Keynote: Foundation Models Don’t Understand Me
Lessons From AI Lutherie for Live Performances
Living in a world of rapidly accelerating synthetic media, the outputs of generative AI often leave us feeling frustrated, amused, and even manipulated. Early examples of creative AI tools struggle to go beyond imitating styles and patterns, producing a context-less blend of borrowed aesthetics from the datasets they’re trained on. This race to the statistically average flattened aesthetic, misunderstands the core goals of creative expression. In contrast, Audio developers and Instrument builders understand the importance of providing a toolkit of exploration, intentional serendipity and discovery to a new age of artists performing with AI. In my work of building AI musical instruments for live Opera, Symphony and Installations, I share a framework of frustrations and guidelines for AI instrument building.
Manaswi Mishra
PhD Researcher
MIT Media Lab
Manaswi Mishra is a LEGO Pappert Fellow and a current PhD research assistant in the Opera of the Future group, MIT Media Lab. His research explores strategies and frameworks for a new age of composing, performing and learning music using A.I. centered on bespoke human intent. He joined the MIT Media Lab in 2019 and completed his MS in Media Arts and Science, developing his work “Living, Singing A.I”, to empower bespoke A.I. music making with just the human voice. His AI instruments have been featured in Opera and Symphony performances like VALIS (2023), Brain Opera (2022), Flow Symphony (2024). His work has been published and exhibited in the MIT Press, Harvard Tech Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Conferences of Computational Creativity, ISEA Brisbane, IFA Stuttgart, CVPR 2024, Burning Man 2023, Copyright Society 2023, Bloomberg Law, Seoul Arts Center, etc.
Prior to joining MIT, he did a Masters in Music Technology at UPF, Barcelona and Bachelors in Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He is passionate about a creative future where every individual can express, reflect, create and connect through music. Manaswi is also a founding instigator of the Music Tech Community in India and has organized workshops, hackathons and community events to foster a future of music and technology in his home country. In his free time, Manaswi loves collecting weird sounds.