AI meets God in Jacob Mühlrad’s symphony “Einride”

In his latest work, Jewish liturgical musical traditions are combined with data sequences from the autonomous vehicle's operating system, "translated" into notes, producing a ten-minute AI-meets-God symphony. The piece, called "Einride", will premiere tomorrow, at Gävle Concert Hall, Sweden.

“When I met Robert Falck for the first time, last spring, we quickly found a common chord, an almost identical approach to our callings. He runs a tech company and I write music, but the similarities are more numerous one might expect. Then and there I had the idea to translate Einride’s algorithms into music, allowing the piece to transcend my own limitations as a musician, extracting my ego from it”, says Jacob Mühlrad.

“The idea: follow the thoughts of an artificial intelligence, step by step, to the highest abstraction level, i.e. binary numbers, electrical impulses. And then conceptually connect the binary numbers to music. In the symphonic piece ‘Einride’, I overlay the AI's lidar system's binary data, with Jewish liturgical tunes. AI meets God”, says Jacob Mühlrad.

“What Jacob does with his music, and what we do at Einride, originates from the same philosophy: an uncompromising idealism. In a way, we are on the same journey. Einride expresses itself in tech and steel. Jacob translates these same ideas into another language, into tones and melodies. It's strange and touching, because it proves something about the kinship of souls, says Robert Falck, CEO and founder of Einride.

Jacob Mühlrad's works have been performed at Carnegie Hall in New York and National Portrait Gallery in London.

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