Presentation at UKAIRS - September 8-9, 2025
Top photo, from left to right: Anna Xambó and Gerard Roma
The inaugural UK AI Research Symposium (UKAIRS) took place at Northumbria University, 8-9 September 2025, in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK – the first event to bring together researchers from a variety of academic disciplines, all working within the AI community.
Gerard Roma and I presented the Sensing the Forest project on Tuesday, 9th September 2025, with the poster:
- Xambó, Anna; Batchelor, Peter; Marino, Luigi; Roma, Gerard; Bell, Mike; and Xenakis, George (2025). Soundscape-based music and creative AI: Insights and promises, UK AI Research Symposium (UKAIRS) 2025, Newcastle, UK.
Abstract: Technological revolution and industrialisation are, sadly, disconnecting us, humans, from our natural environment. This loss of connection with nature is waning activities such as listening to natural sounds. Monitoring and understanding the natural sounds of our environment can help identify possible changes or anomalies, which in turn can inform the bigger picture of depletion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and climate change, among others. This position paper investigates the insights and promises of creative uses of AI applied to soundscape-based music in the form of musical instruments and practices. By looking at AI-enhanced bespoke DIY technologies for streaming and analysing live soundscapes, live coding with natural sounds or processing sound events, we can shed light on generating and manipulating new sonic material for music performance. This approach can raise awareness of the fundamental connection between sound and the environment.
We received valuable feedback from the visitors, with suggestions including:
- ReX: Use of Causal Responsibility EXplanations for Image Classifiers and Tabular Data to understand our dataset of audio recordings seen as time series to see its patterns and evolutions.
- Filters: Explore the weather dataset of 15 sensor values as filters of the audio recordings.
- Agency: Look more into the philosophical aspect of agency in the project, informed by our presentation on the same symposium based on the journal article: Xambó, A., & Roma, G. (2024). Human–machine agencies in live coding for music performance. Journal of New Music Research, 53(1–2), 33–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2024.2442355
- Complexity analysis: Use of complexity analysis to understand the large amount of data collected: one year of audio recordings and weather data.
The poster can be downloaded here.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to visitors for their valuable feedback.