Nagoya University 150th Anniversary Event: First Collaboration Between Androids and the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra－Keiichiro Shibuya Android Opera Scary Beauty

After Talk
Following the performance, an after-talk featuring Keiichiro Shibuya (Composer, musician), Kohei Ogawa (Researcher), Motohiro Kawashima (Composer, conductor), Shintaro Imai (Computer musician), and Takashi Ikegami (Researcher) will take place.
After-talk coordinator: Kenji Ohno, Vice President of Nagoya University

This festival, curated by Yuko Hasegawa (Councilor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), focuses on performance art and sound installations that evoke new relationships between the natural world and materiality. The festival showcases works at various locations in Sharjah, embodying a unique Japanese philosophy of animism in the context of human and non-human interrelationships.

The Middle East premiere of the Android Opera Scary Beauty was held as the festival’s finale in September 2019 at the newly established Sharjah Performing Arts Academy. The performance was made possible through a collaboration with the local NSO Symphony Orchestra (UAE).

Official Website

The operatic performance Scary Beauty, conceived and directed by composer and musician Keiichiro Shibuya, features a humanoid android with artificial intelligence (AI) that conducts a human orchestra and sings alongside the players. Although Shibuya composed the music, the android, Alter 3, is responsible for deciding and leading tempo, volume and singing expression.

The opera lyrics are an amalgamation of critical texts: a love song by Michel Houellebecq, cut-up texts by William S. Burroughs, extracts from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s last work, On Certainty, and others.

A metaphor for the transitional nature of the relationship between humans and technology, the performance shows the fatalistic side of the future, where humans cannot exist without the technology they create.

A prototype of the opera with an early version of the android was performed in Australia in 2017. The work then had its world premiere with an updated android called Alter 2 at ALIFE 2018, which was an international conference on artificial life at the Miraikan, Tokyo. Alter 2 was created by robot scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro, and it used an autonomous AI　program developed by artificial life scientist Takashi Ikegami. Alter 3 is the newest iteration of the android, further developed by the scientists with contributions from mixi, Inc. and Warner Music Japan Inc. The latest version of the opera with Alter 3 was successfully performed in Düsseldorf in 2019 and in Sharjah (UAE) in 2020 Jan.

“Scary Beauty” is the concept advocated by Keiichiro Shibuya and will continue to develop in various projects in future.

“Scary beauty” is a new mono opera performed by “Skelton”(humanoid android) with human orchestra. This android has been developed by Hiroshi Ishiguro(professor in Osaka University) and improved the degree of freedom in motion like human by Takashi Ikegami(professor in Tokyo University).

The music has three parts, each part is composed of a collage of text in each works by Michel Houellebecq, Yukio Mishima and William Burroughs. This texts is selected as imaging a weird scene after all mankind become extinct. Android in asexual condition sings in a synthetic voice with a 10 peace traditional chamber orchestra.

And a worldwide fashion house “sacai”, leaded by Chitose Abe produces android’s costume.

When seeing scenes from a motion like human to a motion cannot human do with a weird voice cannot human utter by android, what is on our mind? There are coexistence of some elements beyond our image and contrast, audience will gain a new feeling between scary and beauty.

The motion on “Skelton” is not programed in advance, it is generated by orchestra performance in real time. This generating system adopt “Spiking neural network” composed of a model copying neuron systems in human brain. An output of this network is expressed as android’s behavior, it has many patterns from kind of periodic to chaotic, it depends on a performance by human orchestra. It is world’s first performance with android and human.

Australian Art Orchestra(AAO),succeeding multidisciplinary activities as contemporary music ensemble performs with android. Shibuya plays as composer, conductor and piano player.

In stage production, Takayuki Fujimoto produces stage lighting and Tomohito Wakui produces projected image. There is a large two plane screen behind the stage, projected a live broadcasting on the stage and edited video in advance, with lighting by full use of LED.