Three researchers join the Posthuman Music research team
Orpheus Instituut is delighted to welcome three researchers who will support Paulo de Assis in his ERC Advanced Grant project Posthuman Music: Creative Practices after AI and Blockchain. The researchers bring complementary artistic and scholarly perspectives to a project that investigates how emerging technologies are transforming musical creativity, authorship and agency.
Posthuman Music addresses the transformative impact of artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies on contemporary musical practices with special emphasis on the emergence of more-than-human creative agencies. The project explores the evolving concept of 'posthuman music' as a forward-looking perspective that brings together human and non-human creative agents. The following researchers will contribute to groundbreaking research in composition, sound art, music philosophy, digital media studies, and contemporary philosophy (Posthumanism, Assemblage Theory) with potential implications for the future of music creation, distribution, and understanding.
Majella Clarke: rethinking the role of the conductor
Conductor, oboist, pianist, composer and sound artist Majella Clarke explores expanded conducting through technology and composition. Her practice moves between orchestral and experimental contexts, investigating conducting as a creative and compositional practice and examining new forms of ensemble interaction, agency and musical aesthetics.
Within MetamusicX and the ERC Posthuman Music project, Clarke’s research focuses on human–machine performance and posthuman approaches to conducting. Her work asks how technology can reshape not only the tools available to performers, but also the roles and relationships that structure musical performance.
Technology has transformed instrumental performance. My research asks: what does the 21st-century conductor look, sound and feel like?
Her research contributes particularly to the project’s exploration of new creative practices and the changing relationship between human and non-human agents in music-making.
Eveline Vervliet: composing with destruction and preservation
Composer and sound artist Eveline Vervliet is based in Germany and Belgium. Her practice encompasses concert music, (web) installations, sound walks and other forms of artistic research. She studied composition in Tilburg with Kees van den Bergh and Anthony Fiumara and in Stuttgart with Luxa Mart*in Schüttler. Since then, she has received the STIP-5 scholarship from Musikfonds and commissions from, among others, Transit (Festival 20·21) for Nadar Ensemble, Ensemble Proton, Felix Nagl, De Link, UAN duo and deSingel.
Working across Research Strands 3 and 4, Eveline's project integrates artificial intelligence and blockchain as co-agents within a framework of auto-destructive composition. Her research examines its destructive potential, employing AI as a co-executor to break down, erode, and erase musical structures, while reflecting on the underlying power dynamics and potentially violent tendencies of these technologies. In parallel, she investigates blockchain as a mechanism for preservation, using decentralized networks to archive and track the remaining traces left behind after destruction.
My research engages AI as a co-executor not just to generate music, but to actively deconstruct and erase it—reflecting on the technology’s destructive capacity while using blockchain to preserve the traces that remain.
This practice offers a direct entry point into the project’s broader investigation into the changing ontology of musical works, probing how posthuman technologies can simultaneously dismantle, transform, and reassemble creative agency.
Massimiliano Cerioni: developing new creative practices with AI
Massimiliano Cerioni is an Italian composer, artist and programmer specialising in electroacoustic and drone composition, creative coding, generative art, deep listening performance and AI prompt engineering for artistic applications. As a PhD researcher within the Posthuman Music ERC project and the MetamusicX research cluster, he will work across Research Strands 3 and 4, developing new creative practices with AI as well as exploring their implications for music practice, composition and performance. His research will investigate sonic phenomena emerging from distributed agencies across human, AI and acoustic feedback systems.
By treating technological music-making as a dynamical system with emergent properties, I aim to flatten the agency between human and non-human collaborators to establish a grounded posthuman musical practice.
A multidisciplinary research team
Majella Clarke, Eveline Vervliet and Massimiliano Cerioni join an established research team working under the direction of Principal Investigator Paulo de Assis. The project also includes composer and artistic researcher Adam Łukawski, who leads Research Strand 3, focusing on practice-based research with agential AI, smart contracts and algorithmic workflows. Martin Zeilinger, meanwhile, leads Research Strand 2, Decentralised Creativity and Algorithmic Agency, bringing expertise in critical media theory and artistic experimentation at the intersection of music, technology and society. Alicia Reyes will contribute to Research Strand 4, which explores music practice through composition and performance.
Together, the team works across the project’s interconnected research strands, combining artistic research, composition, performance, music philosophy, digital media studies and emerging technologies. Over the coming years, Posthuman Music will generate scholarly publications, artistic works, digital performances, experimental toolkits and an online platform. Led by Paulo de Assis, the project provides a sustained environment for investigating how AI, blockchain and other technological developments may transform musical practices, creative agency and our understanding of what music can be.
