The opera, developed by phase7's artistic director Sven Sören Beyer, embarks on a music-theatrical investigation on the impact that artificial intelligence has on our human, social and creative existence. Apart from using several neural networks in our compositional process we also created an artificial intelligence pipeline, whose output became a character of the opera on its own account.
Chasing Waterfalls is a co-production of the artist collective phase7 performing.arts Berlin with Semperoper Dresden and the Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival. Projectpartner is the Telekom MMS. Kindly supported by Sächsische Semperoper Stiftung
OUR ROLE Co-Composition , Spatial Sound, Sound Design, AI voice creation // CONDUCTOR Angus Lee // IDEA & CONCEPT Sven Sören Beyer, Johann Casimir Eule, Christiane Neudecker // LIBRETTO Christiane Neudecker // DIRECTION & STAGING Sven Sören Beyer // CO-COMPOSITION Angus Lee // VISUALS Studio Eigengrau, Frieder Weiss and Ployz // LIGHT DESIGN Henning Schletter // SET DESIGN Pedro Richter Atelier Berlin // DRAMATURGY Johann Casimir Eule // AI VOICE technical support from T-Systems MMS // YEAR 2022
Chasing Waterfalls premiered in fall 2022 at the Semperoper in Dresden and had its Asian premiere at Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival. We co-composed the opera with Angus Lee for 6 human singers and for the first time in the history of the genre, for one singing voice synthesis system.
With the technical help of T-System MMS the audience was able to hear lines composed by the AI without any human intervention. The 5th scene of Chasing Waterfalls was dedicated entirely to this character, who took the stage and reflected on its own existence.
