Poems by Alpha - Adi Gelbart

The multimedia artist and programmer Adi Gelbart intermingles jazz, library music, musique concrète, weird rock music and even weirder synthesizer sounds to humorously pursue essential questions: How can creativity be defined when man and machine are inextricably united? What if computers take over? For this purpose the human musician Gelbart works with a poetry writing machine called Alpha. Rather than trying to pass for human, Alpha is designed to do as poorly as possible on a Turing test. Together with the ensemble KNM Berlin, Gelbart will interpret Alpha’s poems in a concert for strings, speech synthesis and electronics. The soulful and multi-layered music is meant to build a bridge between the computerized artist and the human audience. The piece takes up Gelbart’s novel Egglike, which has a soundtrack with lyrics written by Alpha. 

Composition: Adi Gelbart, poems: Alpha

Ensemble KNM Berlin
Theodor Flindell, Violine
Michael Yokas, Violine
Kirstin Maria Pientka, Viola
Cosima Gerhardt, Violoncello