Half-Broken Hymns for Synthetic Souls

Half-Broken Hymns for Synthetic Souls is built from AI-generated songs that I selected, dismantled and reconstructed into a new work for ensemble and electronics. Between these fragments are a series of interludes created using generative MIDI processes, including arpeggiators and chord triggers; technologies that produce musical material with very little direct human input.

While writing the piece, I was reading Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life and his ideas around hauntology; the feeling that contemporary culture is increasingly haunted by echoes of its own past. AI-generated music seemed to embody that idea. It can imitate almost any style convincingly, yet often struggles to escape the music that already exists.

Fragments of those AI-generated songs fracture, disappear and return in altered forms, creating a work that asks whether something mechanical, derivative and synthetic can become expressive.