Ongoing project · 03 · since 2026
What the C*rp*s
An ongoing machine-listening project: corpora assembled from other people's recordings, navigated and recombined by Somax2 in live human–machine performance rather than replayed in their original order.
What the C*rp*s is an ongoing project rather than a finished album. Each work takes a corpus of recordings made by other people and a live exciter played by the composer, and lets Somax2 — IRCAM’s co-creative machine-listening system — navigate and recombine the corpus in real time. The system never reproduces the original sequence; fragments lose their identity and become part of an extended electroacoustic morphology held together by repetition, deviation and continuous renewal.
The question the project keeps returning to is the one its title puts: whose music is this, when the material was recorded by other people, the sequence was chosen by a machine listening in real time, and the composer’s part is the exciter, the trajectory and the intervention.
Where the corpora come from
The three works so far are built from Creative Commons recordings published on Freesound, credited in full on each work’s page. The open call now running invites recordings sent directly by contributors — instruments, objects, voice, augmented and self-built instruments — for the corpus of the works to come. Everyone who contributes is credited.
The call is open until 30 November 2026.