LOVE GAMES

for six players, electronics and video (2023)

I came across a free ‘AI pop song generator’ that creates songs based off custom prompts. I suggested the word ‘love’ and it generated a text that was simple and strange, like the vocabulary of a child but with a surreal syntax, a chain of loosely-related, one-syllable words:

Breathe, love, hug me
Hold, love, breathe, love
The love train, the love train
Oh my God we came into this life
So bad it hurts

I converted the text to speech and listened to an artificial voice recite the poem in its choppy, mechanical cadence. It was moving hearing these sweet words rendered in such a clinical way; it evoked a weird, non-human kind of empathy. In LOVE GAMES, six players accompany this voice with a simple unison melody, then with harmony, creating a sort of naïve, AI folk music.

Commissioned by Stomping Ground and performed in October 2023 at Siobhan Davies Studios in London.

Kate Ryder - Toy Piano
Ben Nobuto - Violin
Maya-Leigh Rosenwasser - Glockenspiel
David Nunn - Keyboard
Clara Daly Donnellan - Melodica / Toy Piano
Pia Rose Scattergood - Toy Piano / Singing Bowl