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You might reasonably wonder whether “Lexia: An AI Opera,” a new piece composed by Indiana University Indianapolis professor Scott Deal, is a story about artificial intelligence or whether the technology itself is somehow part of the production.
The answer is yes.
Lexia, which debuts Jan. 11 at Indianapolis’ Phoenix Theatre, is set in a dystopian future where leaders use AI to help run the country. And Deal used Avatar, an AI-powered tool he developed with fellow IU Indianapolis professor Jason Palamara, to help him compose the opera’s score.
Deal and Palamara, both of whom teach in IU Indianapolis’ music technology department, developed Avatar as a tool that can, among other things, improvise music alongside a live musician.
Unlike other AI music tools, like technology that can create a song in the style of a particular artist or musical genre, Avatar uses machine learning to listen to a human musician and respond to that person in real time, adding its own sounds as a human improvisational partner might.
Deal used the material produced in improvisations to create the score for the opera.
The creators can envision a host of other uses for the technology, which they hope to someday commercialize so other musicians can incorporate it into their own work.
“It is like working with a real person, in a sense,” Deal said of Avatar. “I’ve done a lot of things in technology, but this one right now is the most exciting thing I think I’ve ever done.”
Deal, a classically trained percussionist, and Palamara, a music technology expert whose background is in music theory and composition, spent more than a year developing Avatar.
Palamara, who handled the technical aspects of Avatar’s development, trained the tool using several hours’ worth of recordings of Deal playing a vibraphone. The two chose a vibraphone because when a mallet hits the instrument’s metal bars, the instrument produces sustained tones and reverberations that make the training process easier, Deal said.
Palamara said he and Deal kept ethical considerations in mind when developing Avatar, and the tool is not designed to mimic copyrighted music from other artists.
“We’re not ripping anybody off,” Palamara said. “There’s no way that you can use this to create a new Green Day or Weezer track.”
Since 2019, Deal has performed using the technology numerous times, but most of those have been brief demonstrations at academic conferences or at experimental-music gatherings.
“Lexia: An AI Opera” represents the most ambitious project yet for Avatar, Deal said. He specifically chose to debut the opera at the Phoenix because he wanted an off-campus venue. “The idea is to take it out to the world and not keep it in academia,” he said.
Following next month’s show at the Phoenix, Lexia is also booked for a Feb. 14 performance at the Roulette Theatre, an experimental music venue in Brooklyn, New York.
The opera is funded with $50,000 from an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship and additional funding from the Donald Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center at IU’s Herron School of Art and Design.
Avatar won’t be Deal’s improv partner during performances of Lexia. But Deal did use the technology to help him compose the score for the opera. “It can provide the seed for an idea that I can develop.”
Deal worked with New York City-based playwright and librettist Kat Mustatea on the opera. Mustatea created the libretto—the words that tell the story—and Deal used Avatar to compose the score—the music that Deal and the other musicians will play.
Deal compared Avatar to the block of marble a sculptor uses as the starting point for a sculpture. Using various filters and guidance along with his own playing, Deal got Avatar to create the musical equivalent of that marble block. He then shaped and altered that raw material, using it as the basis for the opera’s score which includes parts for flute, clarinets, various percussion instruments and a bass synthesizer.
As a technology, Avatar is still somewhat finicky and glitchy. It’s not yet at the point where Deal and Palamara could hand it off to someone else who could use it without their help. But that’s the long-term goal.
Palamara and Deal are still working to improve the tool. Once they have developed a more robust version that’s more reliable and easier to use, they’d like to pursue commercialization so other people can use Avatar.
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