Ensemble 3

The project invites two musicians to form a band with a computer, making the constellation an Ensemble of 3. While computers have been part of bands for a long time, now they are more OK than ever before and the one we're talking about here runs a script that has been pretrained on musical material. It can therefore join in with a musical understanding and is capable of responding in ways that cannot fully be foreseen by the human members. 

The name of this synthesized improvisational system is MusicHal_9000. 

The interplay between MusicHal_9000 and human musicians creates a unique musical experience where the role of the computer is as autonomous as the role of the musicians, or at least as close as we can get at the moment. Under the hood, the computer's mindset and capability is shaped by a model, in which the fingerprints of both harmonic and rhythmical contents have been stored using a training script. This script, aptly titled Chandra_trainer, looks for gestures in a dimensional space that forms the basis of a neural network, before quantizing them into tokens that are then used to find correlation patterns.

The data from this pre-process is then stored in a model, which is what allows MusicHal_9000 to understand music in a way similar to ours. It knows that after Token 42, Token 17 usually follows, much like we intuitively know patterns too, although we don’t usually talk about tokens, we talk about notes, chords and other labelling systems we have invented for ourselves. 

There is a lot more technical stuff going on of course, but in short: 

MusicHal_9000 is capable, in real time, of recognizing “this”, then responding with “that”, and can also vary phrasing, use different modalities and change behaviour during a performance. At times it will also choose to be silent, to allow others to play and interact, which is (obviously) very important in musical contexts. Most importantly, it listens to the room, meaning that every sound in it is picked up, and becomes a part of the source material. Not midi, one note at a time, but everything, the drums and the guitar, the sound it produces itself, coughing, phones ringing, background noise, and so on. 

Designed specifically for (and by) Jonas Sjøvaag, the dynamics of the system enables him to use it both as an extension in solo setting with drums only, or with other collaborators. The video below shows a practice session with Jonas and MusicHal_9000, clearly showcasing that the interaction goes both ways. 

As of November 2025 the concept of Ensemble³ has resulted in the record "III" (JSJS), with Sjøvaag (drums), Juhani Silvola (guitar) and Andreas Ulvo on keys. It was based on an early version of the script, the Drift Engine, which was much more limited in its response calculation. That same version was also presented at SAR Forum in Porto 2025, with António Augusto Aguiar (bass)

Both Ensemble3 and the band are the most current results of Sjøvaag's ongoing work as an artistic researcher, currently in the finishing stages of a PhD titled "Music in the making: identities and personality at play". Below is an excerpt from a longer session from the recording of III, featuring Juhani and the Drift Engine.