two tales from the shadows of the grid
for the EV and RAVE neural synthesis AI model
recorded 28 August 2025
First Place, IEEE Big Data 2025 3rd Workshop on AI Music Generation: AI Music Competition (AIMG 2025), Macau, China / Online (9 Dec 2025)
Also presented:
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop: AI for Music (7 Dec 2025)
Program Notes:
In two tales from the shadows of the grid, sound is drawn from what digital systems are designed to ignore. Beneath ideals of precision, clarity, and binary certainty lies a residue of excess information, unstable traces, discarded errors, and quiet ambiguities. This piece listens toward those margins, treating what is usually filtered away as primary material and allowing it to surface as form, motion, and texture.
The EV’s new integration with RAVE (Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder) transforms the instrument into a kind of meta-resonator—a system that listens to itself through the lens of a neural model. Rather than applying fixed effects, the model opens a parallel pathway back into the instrument’s own timbral identity, accessed through an alternate causal route. The latent space becomes a landscape of possibilities, each dimension a potential resonance between gesture, synthesis, and the acoustic body of the strings.
The EV, as a digital acoustic instrument, moves along the fault line between structured signal and unruly remainder. Through its dialogue with a RAVE neural synthesis model, the work invites the shadowed data of the grid into audible space, not as noise to be corrected but as substance to be shaped. What unfolds is a terrain of partial signals and blurred intentions, where two trajectories weave through remnants of the digital system, carrying with them the weight of what was never meant to be heard.
Credits:
Lindgren: composition, mixing/mastering, video recording + post production
Related:
Extended abstract from NeurIPS 2025: EVxRAVE Paper
Program notes from IEEE Big Data 2025 3rd Workshop on AI Music Generation: two tales from the shadows of the grid
Demonstration Video: