Concerts presenting the latest works by composers associated with the Wrocław Branch of the Polish Composers’ Union have been a fixture I the Musical Electronica Nove programmes. This year's premieres will focus on reflections on the potential of artificial intelligence and its influence on human existence.

The titular coup de grâce in Agata Zemla’s piece expresses an act of grace, mercy, meaning a fatal blow dealt to a suffering or injured being, shortening their suffering. This composition also touches transience and mourning. A deeply emotional experience became an impulse for the artist to reflect on the transience of human life. As part of the premiere of a work with such an intimate character, the author also planned to convey her message to the audience in a form unusual for a concert. “The desire to create ‘something for eternity’ is just an attempt to fool time, which will wash us all away anyway," Adam Porębski reflects on the canvas of One-time Music. “We strain ourselves to create great works that can supposedly change the world, touch on the absolute, address the issue of life and death, comment on reality... But seriously: who cares at all?” the composer further outlines his intention, questioning the value of art in a reality that functions within a short sell by date.

“Cogito ergo sum” – Descartes’ words are still used to prove our existence as sentient beings. In our time increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, we know that AI is not capable of abstract thinking, although it seems to be. Magdalena Gorwa’s piece touches on the sense of creating art by humans in the clash with the possibilities of technology, which also “creates” by generating music, images and even literature. Will it soon replace artists? Although it is just an advanced computation machine, its possibilities arouse justifiable fear. The uncanny valley is a concept in robotics and computer animation that describes our emotional response to robots and other artificial beings very similar to humans. The human level of sympathy for them initially tends to increase, but then – when we start to notice their subtle imperfections – the graph drops rapidly, and this is the said “valley”. Paweł Hendrich transfers this phenomenon to the field of computer music, creating sounds that evoke uncertainty as to their origin - acoustic (“natural”) or synthetic (“artificial”). It is therefore very likely that the audience will confuse these two. This variability turns out to be both the reason for so much tension in the piece and a reference to the titular inequalities.

Less than a decade ago, probably the most important article in today’s perspective on the AI ​​phenomenon was written – Attention Is All You Need. Its authors elaborated on the so-called transformers, which form the basis of large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT. These are neural networks containing many parallel layers of “attention” – hence the name “multi-headed attention” – allowing the model to capture various relationships between successive words and sentences. Adrian Foltyn in Multi-headed p-attention wonders what would happen if the same idea and mathematical transformations of “attention” and transformers were used for the controlled process of generating musical text.