Artists: Benjamin Bacon, Vivian Xu

Performers: B6 (Lou Nanli), Wang Wenwei, Shanghai Philharmonic String Quartet

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The Bio-harmonic Quartet is a hybrid performance system that links together several musicians and artists via a biofeedback network. This network acts as a musical interface and uses the collective data of participants’ bodily activities to generate music and soundscapes in collaboration with ML models. The work is an exploration into human-machine relationships within the context of music creation. The piece began as an exploration into BCI and ML technologies and how they might disrupt and evolve music creation, production, and performance. It moves beyond the artist’s earlier exploration of machine networks and human-machine interaction models to create a more complex human machine system that works in harmony towards creative expression. The piece consists of machine learning models and basic wearable sensory systems that capture muscle movement, pulse, and BCI data. Further research with multi-nodal open source BCI sensors is ongoing to further develop this work.

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Bioharmonic Quartet was performed under the design collective name Dogma Lab.