How an opera powered by AI in Hong Kong uses audience’s voices to create unique performances each time
- Finnish opera Laila is held to small audiences of just three or four people in a custom-made dome that projects images and shifting colours from its walls
- Visitors can use gestures to influence the music and also control a group of virtual creatures in a story about life, death, redemption and transformation
Even though the Finnish original opera Laila was conceived back in 2019 before anyone had heard the word “Covid”, it could hardly have been better designed for a pandemic.
The production, one of the most extraordinary works in this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival – performances of which organisers announced on February 10 would be postponed – is held for small audiences of just three or four people in a custom-made dome, where music is “made” through recorded vocal interactions with the other audience members.
“The whole process of creating Laila was like a premonition of what was going to follow,” says conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, from his home in Helsinki.
As an audience member you enter the space via a small antechamber, where an AI-powered computer verifies your height, so it can later distinguish you from the other visitors. It then asks you to say some words into a recorder: notions such as love, future, desperation, hope.
“Our theory was that when you start reading these words out loud, you kind of reveal something that you were not expecting to reveal,” Salonen says. It’s a little like the Rorschach ink test, he adds – a way of tapping into your inner psyche and preparing for the event that is about to unravel.
