Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Artist in Residence 2022

In April 2022, composer, director and artist Esmeralda Conde Ruiz (b.1980 in Spain, lives in London) starts the third Schaufler residency of the first funding phase. During her six-month stay, she will be working with fellowship holders at the Schaufler Kolleg@TU Dresden, scholars and scientists at the TU Dresden and Fine Arts Academy Dresden, HELLERAU – Europäisches Zentrum der Künste (European Center for the Arts), partners at the lab and other institutions and projects.

© Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden

In recent years, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz has often worked at the interface between music and visual arts. She is especially interested in exploring the possible boundaries of choral composition, which she transforms musically and visually, decoding them and transposing them into new contexts. She has collaborated with renowned artists such as Yoko Ono, Olafur Eliasson, Johann Johannsson, Robert Wilson and Susan Philipsz. She achieved international recognition for the realization of a 500-member choral performance of Peter Liversidge’s song cycle “The Bridge” for the opening of the Tate Modern’s expansion in London in 2016. In addition, she has performed with the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and at the Barbican Centre in London. Her work with mass choirs also includes David Lang’s “the public domain” at the Berliner Philharmonie (2018) and at New York’s Lincoln Center (2016). Currently, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz is the musical director for “Station Clock” by the Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz, a giant aural clock with 1,092 singers for the new train station in Birmingham. At the same time, she is composing a “rubbish trilogy” for a project at the Dresdner Philharmonie to be performed with the philharmonic choirs.

Images of earlier works of the artist

Her research interests, which extend far beyond conventional work with choirs, led her to apply for the residency at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden. Conde Ruiz describes her proposal as follows:

“As a composer I am very interested in exploring the idea of an AI choir: an AI choir that doesn’t imitate human sound, but rather represents a unique, new type of instrument. One that is inspired by the mechanisms of human choirs, but is based on new aural qualities, languages and ideas. I would like to develop this concept through experiments and workshops with AI and real choirs as well as in exchange with various scientists and scholars at the university. The result will be a sound installation as well as a visual realization of the discoveries.”

Collaborative artistic research

In monthly on-line meetings with Miriam Akkermann, Junior Professor for Empirical Musicology in the Division of Musicology at the TU Dresden Institute of Art and Music and herself a sound artist, Conde Ruiz has been planning the framing for the AI choir concept since September 2021. Guiding questions are: How might an AI choir sound? What happens when a collective resonating body is disembodied? What is a non-human choir capable of as opposed to human singers? What is special about a human choir and how can the disembodiment of an AI choir be used productively for a synthetic, more ephemeral sound? What happens with an AI-induced clone of human voices—and is the experiment pleasant for our ears or is this even relevant?

With the CeTi – Center for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop – one of the excellence clusters at the TUD and cooperation partner of the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden is closely involved in the technical implementation of the AI choir. In initial talks with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank H. P. Fitzek beginning in the winter of 2021/22, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz has been discussing potential overlaps between the research on learning systems and supporting tools that can be used to generate an AI choir.

Further support for the acoustic-technical aspects of the project is provided by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ercan Altinsoy. He is the Chair of Acoustics and Haptic Engineering at the Institute for Acoustics and Speech Communications in the TUD Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Altinsoy is also a research partner at the CeTi. The institute has three specialized acoustic rooms available for aural experiments.  

Collaboration with the TUD university choir and other Dresden choirs such as AuditivVokal is envisaged. Various participatory formats are planned for the residency in summer 2022 which include classic choir rehearsals with experimental challenges as well as disco nights taking place under the banner “Larynx Nights” with a large audience seeking a capella performances.

The artist also plans to work closely with Natalie Sontopski, fellow at the Schaufler Kolleg@TU Dresden and research assistant in the digital culture laboratory at Merseburg University. In her dissertation topic “Strategies of Speculation. ‘Doing Speculation’ in the Field of Creative AI” Sontopski works with AI and has chosen Esmeralda Conde Ruiz’ residency as an object of study. A contribution from Sontopski’s cumulative dissertation project is an analysis of the collaboration among art, scholarship and institutions. On her initiative, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz will take part in a conference at Meresburg University in July 2022.  

The artist’s external partners are HELLERAU – Europäisches Zentrum der Künste (European Center of the Arts) with the Program Director for Music and Media, Moritz Lobeck, as well as the internationally renowned sound artist Prof. Carsten Nicolai, who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, and the Dresdner Philharmonic.