Armed with an old analog synthesizer as well as AI, French composer DeLaurentis explores the heritage left by electronic music pioneers for the Printemps de Bourges.
With a huge old analog synthesizer or by cloning voices using artificial intelligence, producer DeLaurentis travels through time to pay tribute to the pioneers of electronic music.
Her creation, designed for her presentation on Wednesday at the Printemps de Bourges, resonates with the news less than two months after the death at 94 of Éliane Radigue, a figure in concrete music who walked in the footsteps of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, without benefiting from the same recognition.
For the occasion, DeLaurentis will play on an ARP 2500, a rare modular synthesizer straight from the 1970s and a central instrument of Éliane Radigue. This serves as a reminder that the beginnings of electronic music attracted researchers, engineers, and female composers.
“They were meeting at the BBC, in research labs to create these new instruments, but often they were in the shadow of other traditional composers focusing on the score, melody, and harmony,” said the French producer, in front of two illuminated pads on which she plays.
“They brought the ‘sound design’, what we now call sound dressing, so it wasn’t considered composition at the time,” she added.
Consequently, their names were not mentioned in the final work. American composer Wendy Carlos is known for revisiting Purcell’s baroque work on a Moog synthesizer for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).
But she was not credited on the first edition of the film’s soundtrack. The omission has since been rectified. “But it shows that these pioneers took time to return,” DeLaurentis remarked.
Limitless Universe
“When you start producing music and you’re a woman, it’s important to have role models to admire,” she emphasized. She was influenced by American experimental musician Laurie Anderson, a rare survivor of this invisibility, who achieved success as early as 1981 with O Superman.
Like her peers, DeLaurentis enjoys spending her days surrounded by machines, creating a new artistic language, as shown in her latest album, Musicalism, released in early 2025.
This sonic explorer – who often wears combinations – travels through a limitless universe, where organic instruments (piano) and technological instruments (synthesizer, controller, pad), including AI, float.
“I will hybridize my voice with sounds and, prior to artificial intelligence, this was not possible: this is what we call vocal cloning,” explained Cécile Léogere, who works with the Institute of Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (Ircam) and the Sony research laboratory in Paris.
In addition to giving life to new sounds, AI reinvents her concerts: “While I sing, visuals come to life on a screen and react according to the pitch of my notes, my volume, all the aspects that can be related to the voice,” she enthused. “It’s really work on AI that interests me, a bit different from what we’re talking about today,” she acknowledged.
“Ethical” Relationship with AI
Generative AI, capable of creating tracks from a textual command, disrupts the music industry and its stakeholders, who also denounce a technology based on a global catalog supposed to be protected by copyright.
The producer believes that artificial intelligence, in its various forms, can participate in the creation process. But if it entirely generates a track “without any other human intervention,” “you can’t sign a work saying you composed it,” she concluded. “I think it’s also a relationship with oneself, with ethics.”
“Today AI only reproduces existing repertoires, there is no originality, so I think it doesn’t really concern musicians and creators because we always want something new,” she opined.
“That’s why I use somewhat parallel AIs,” summarized DeLaurentis who, like the pioneers of the last century, dreams of bringing forth “these sounds that do not yet exist.”
