The Art of Being Human

The world’s first symbiotic AI and human orchestra can “think” and “play” like people. But its creators have bigger plans for neurology beyond dazzling concert hall audiences with the impossible

By Zabrina Lo

Opera legend Maria Callas, who died in 1977, will never record a new aria. Or will she? This past summer, computer scientist professor Guo Yike and the head of the department of music professor Johnny Poon used AI technology and computer programming to create a recording of Mendelssohn’s On Wings of Song in the voice of the late New York soprano. It was so realistic that those who were invited to listen to the recording were fooled. “They said to me, ‘Oh, I didn’t realise Callas recorded this song,’” Poon says with a laugh. Callas’s “recording” was one of the university’s art tech team’s first test products in the lead-up to the August launch of the Turing AI Orchestra—the first human-AI ensemble in the world. Named after British mathematician Alan Turing, one…

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Tatler Hong Kong (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2022

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