CMG Orchestra in Hollywood performing a piece composed by AIVA. Photo by Lance Bachelder

AIVA AI is an AI music composer which allows people to create their own personalised life  soundtracks. Here, LUX speaks to its founder, Pierre Barreau, about the future of AI and its impact on the music industry

LUX: Can you give us some background about your company and why you founded it?
Pierre Barreau: AIVA is a company I started almost seven years ago with my co-founder, whom I met at university. We were both musicians and engineers, and there was a natural inclination to start this company with a focus in both fields. The premise we started with was that, while music is an insanely rewarding thing to do and create, it also requires a lot of time, money, and tools. We believe more people out there should be able to create music and would enjoy it, but they don’t have the time or resources.

Our idea was to bring music creation to the masses: we want to help people who are complete amateurs or be able to create music with technology, as well as assisting professional musicians who may just want an assistant to suggest ideas when they have writer’s block, or need a guiding hand to in their creative process.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

LUX: You have both a creative and scientific background, from your filmmaking experience to your studies in computer science and engineering. When did you realise it was possible to marry these two fields?
PB: When you do any sizable project, it becomes very obvious that a good director or composer is one who is well-versed in technology. As a film director, you need to deal with camera software to edit the video you are shooting, you need to deal with lighting. For music creation, it is a bit more nuanced; of course, you can write music with pen and paper, but some of the most prolific music creators these days use their laptops to create music or synthesisers to create music digitally.

You open yourself up to the realm of possibilities if you consider technology as a creative partner when creating music. There is sort of no way, in my opinion, you can be an effective composer or director if you completely shut off technology.

Pierre Barreau

LUX: How would you respond to claims that AI is going to devalue the work of human beings, especially in the creative industries where job security is an issue?
PB: It is an important question; whenever you have a technology that raises the bar for what people are able to do in terms of creating music, it can be a bit scary. But what I would say is that historically there have been other technical advances that have brought music-making to the masses, and these have not reduced human creativity. In fact, they have supercharged it.

When the synthesiser was created, people were very scared that it was going to replace acoustic instruments and that it was going to lead to this world of digital, horrible sounding music. Instead, what it created was a world where we have new genres of music like hip-hop and electronic music. Another example is the invention of the digital audio workstation. It allowed people from their bedrooms to become producers so they didn’t need to hire expensive studios to record their music.

LUX: Can you tell us about your vision to create a personalised life-soundtrack for every person?
PB: I think the interesting thing is using AI to do what we can’t do as humans right now. One such thing is this idea of personalised soundtracks; let’s say you are going running and you want music tailored to your own performance or to stimulate you for the extra mile. Then imagine an AI that could compose what you need based on your own rhythm.

I think that would be a hugely powerful thing to have for very different industries, in this case, running, video games, and interactive content that have a lot of diversity in the gameplay and the stories that they tell, but the music tends to stay the same. Just being able to generate the music as the player moves through the game and the experience, and help them create their own story, can enhance the experience they are having.

LUX: Do you ever think this tool could ever be a danger to society? Could people use it as a means to cause damage?
PB: I don’t think I am worried about the directly manipulative aspects of AI, specifically in music. There could be a lot more said in other domains, like the audio, text and visual domains.

CMG Orchestra in Hollywood performing a piece composed by AIVA. Photo by Lance Bachelder

I think one potential challenge that could be very real is giving powerful tools to those whose intentions are just to flood the market and devalue music by humans. But I think that, fundamentally, human music operates on a completely different set of parameters. We go to concerts not to see a computer performing music but a performer dances, has a show and tells us about their own personal life story through their lyrics. People connect to stars because of their own personal drama and the story surrounding them. I think for that reason, It is more about the economic side, not about manipulation, despite what many depictions of AI would have you think.

LUX: Do you think we could ever get to a point where AI could compose a piece of musical genius, or would they always need human input to do this?
PB: In my opinion, whether we call someone a genius tends to be determined by two things. Firstly, the personal; some people will argue certain composers are geniuses, whilst others will argue totally the opposite. It depends on taste. Secondly, there is hindsight, like how we celebrate composers of the past who weren’t appreciated in their time. I think one of the reasons for that is because, in order to create something which is truly genius, you have to be ahead of your time. It won’t be appreciated immediately, but people will learn.

I think with AI , the aim is to create something humans appreciate now – that’s kind of the point. I am not sure anyone will be able to connect to something that an AI creates that we can’t appreciate now. That is also part of the reason why I am hopeful there will still be human creativity, because we can really only connect to something that pushes the boundaries if it is created by humans, if there is a story behind it. Otherwise, it may be devoid of meaning. But as far as creating something that is exceptionally good in terms of quality, I think AI can definitely do this.

CMG Orchestra in Hollywood performing a piece composed by AIVA. Photo by Lance Bachelder

LUX: How do you imagine an amateur would use your service, and how is this different to the way a professional musician might use it?
PB: For amateurs, the AI will help them to create a composition. Maybe they will modify the composition to better fit what they have in mind, or swap an instrument, add a little bit of musical effects, or switch a few notes here and there. But fundamentally, they will be equal partners, with the AI as writers.
Professionals may use more in-depth features like providing their own musical material instead of letting the AI generate compositions based on that. In general, Making a more in-depth modification of the material is usually the difference between the two.

LUX: Will AI be able to create experimental music like the kind that has never been heard before, or would it always be taken from what’s already existed?
PB: It is very possible to do something that does not exist. But again, we go back to this idea of being able to appreciate what pushes the boundaries, and I think it is harder for humans to appreciate something that is truly out there if it is created by a machine. Whereas, if it is created by humans, it is easier to find a way to connect to the story behind it, which leads you to appreciate this novel idea. Whilst it is functionally possible to do it, I don’t think it creates as much value as when a human does it.

Read more: Deutsche Bank’s global innovators meet in Silicon Valley

LUX: Do you think musicians today are welcoming this kind of innovation, or do you anticipate any backlash to this? What responses have you received so far?
PB: Both. Some people are extremely enthusiastic, even some professional composers that see it as an extension of their own abilities, as a tool. And then there are some people who are completely against it. Looking back at previous technological innovations, it is pretty much the same as before. There tends to be a change of opinion when people try it. Once they begin to try the software, they quickly realise it is just a tool. But when you just talk about AI music on a high-level, conceptual basis, people might be more inclined to fill in the blanks and think the technology is something that it actually isn’t, or does something that it actually can’t do. And so, for that reason, the feedback tends to be quite positive when people tend to use the product themselves instead of discussing high-level concepts.

Find out more: aiva.ai

All photos courtesy of AIVA AI

Attribution science explores the link between climate and extreme weather

Flooding in South Africa, wildfires in California, heatwaves in India: each new extreme weather event seems the inevitable conclusion of ecological breakdown. But how exactly are climate and weather linked? Leading attribution scientist Dr Friederike Otto explains to LUX why we need to nuance our understanding of climate change

Dr Otto is co-lead of World Weather Attribution, an international organisation analysing the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events. Named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2021, Otto has identified an information gap in the public’s understanding of climate, which, she argues, is hindering the creation of reliable and resilient systems in the face of extreme weather. She tells LUX why everything depends on the decisions we make in the next decade

LUX: How sophisticated is the public’s understanding of what effect climate change is having on weather?

Friederike Otto: There is still quite a big lack of understanding about how climate change affects weather. There are lots of people who assume that everything bad that is happening now in the world and in the weather is because of climate change. That is a misconception. There is a huge difference between how climate change affects heatwaves versus how it affects extreme rainfall or droughts, and that is something we need to get much better in communicating.

LUX: So, how are climate and weather linked?

FO: Climate change can affect the weather in two ways. One is the thermodynamic effect: we have more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so the atmosphere gets warmer overall. This means that there is a higher likelihood of heatwaves which are hotter, and a lower likelihood of cold waves, which are warmer than what they would have been. Likewise, because a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour that needs to get out of the atmosphere as rain, you have an increase in heavy rainfall.

If that was the only effect, we wouldn’t need to do attribution studies. The second effect is weather, because we have changed the atmosphere’s composition and temperature differences. This second effect can go in the same direction as the warming effect – but the effects can also counteract each other. If you don’t get any weather systems that bring rain, it won’t rain. So here we need attribution studies.

Otto explains the need for reliable and resilient systems in place to respond to extreme weather

LUX: What do you say to those who think ‘what’s the big deal?’ about the atmosphere getting one degree warmer?

FO: One degree in a heatwave is thousands of people dead or alive. People have pointed out that one degree is lower than the global mean temperature change and that is true. But the year-to-year variation in weather and in temperatures is quite small. If you had one degree added to a heatwave in Antarctica, it would indeed be much less of a big deal, because there is a huge variability in temperatures.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

The heatwave in India is, in today’s climate, a one in 100-year event. With this, you can look at the intensity change: how frequent would this event have been in a world without climate change? What is now a one in a hundred year event used to be a one in 3000 year event without climate change. In other words: a one degree change in intensity corresponds to a 30 times increase in the likelihood.

LUX: So the differences, though seemingly marginal to the casual onlooker, can radically change the climate system?

FO: The climate system will be fine, it will just get hotter. But people and ecosystems have adapted over centuries to a certain type of climate. All of our ecosystems and social systems are very much designed for this narrow range of possible weather that we used to get, so, if you push that back even a little bit, it is much harder to deal with.

Climate change has increased dramatically over the last two decades

LUX: What has allowed the field of attributional climate science to thrive in recent years?

FO: Firstly, we are now able to run climate models so that you can actually look at extreme events. Before, you would run a climate model maybe once or twice — and this only gives you one possible realisation of climate and weather. It wouldn’t allow you to look at extreme events.

The second thing is that climate change has increased dramatically over the last couple decades. We see the trends and changes even in weather observations, so we can detect changes without having even touched a climate model. People have really started to develop and design methodologies to use new data and tools to answer these questions.

LUX: How do day-to-day meteorologists react to your discipline, which is still emerging?

FO: Grumblingly, I think – at least at first, because there have been huge divides between meteorologists who have dealt with day-to-day weather forecasts and those working on climate change. Attribution ultimately forces the two together.

Read more: Professor Nathalie Seddon On Biodiversity And Climate Resilience

Attribution has led to a huge recognition now that it is necessary to make meteorology more relevant for the world we live in. Meteorologists have, for a long time, been extremely conservative when it comes to climate science.

LUX: With the rise of quantum computing, do you think there is the possibility that meteorology will also revolutionise?

FO: A lot of new science could be unlocked through that in meteorology. We would have a lot more higher resolution models to look at what is still not very well understood, for example, cloud interaction with aerosols (and so on). It will not mean that we suddenly have an uncertainty-free science. It’s something that people still have a hard time to live with — that there will always be uncertainty when you do scientific studies, and that this is actually nothing special in climate science.

Otto emphasises the need for greater collaboration between scientific disciplines

LUX: Do you think that there is the possibility of more joined-up thinking between climate science, sustainability, science, biodiversity science?

FO: You can’t try and solve one in isolation from the other. It’s still not easy to do that, because most of us are still trained in a very disciplinary way and we speak very different languages, but the upcoming generations of scientists and researchers are better trained in more interdisciplinary research and increasingly funding is being allocated to interdisciplinary research. So it’s happening, but slowly.

LUX: Is there a tendency for governments to use climate change as a scapegoat to avoid accountability?

FO: Definitely. That’s why it’s important to nuance our climate change understanding. With heatwaves, what used to be a 100 year event is now really just ordinary summer in many places. But for many other extremes, the changes are relatively small. For droughts, there are many parts of the world where they are not yet changing because of climate change.

Read more: Melissa Garvey On Saving The Oceans

The drought in Madagascar is a good example: that has led to quite a lot of food insecurity for the population. That was a rare event, and the population was vulnerable, helped only by NGOs. But these NGOs have always come in when there’s a crisis and then gone away again. There has never been a reliable or resilient system to respond to extreme weather. That is a big problem. There is also an element of colonialism, so it’s not something that the global north can completely wash their hands of. But even if we were to immediately stop greenhouse gas emissions, that wouldn’t solve the problem that southern Madagascar has with respect to drought.

Attribution science has led to a huge recognition that it is necessary to make meteorology more relevant for the world we live in

LUX: Personally, do you feel worried about where things are going?

FO: I’m not worried per se; I’m more frustrated. I feel immensely privileged for who I am, that I’m able to live in a world now where I am able to do whatever I want and be whoever I want. Climate change is one result of this societal system that only benefits a few, but it’s not the only one.

LUX: Do you think it’s your role to point out what is happening and let others judge what to do?

FO: It’s my role as a scientist to say ‘this’ is happening because of ‘that’. It’s my role as a human being to say that it is affecting people who are least responsible for the causes. To pretend that climate scientists are not humans: it’s just not useful.

LUX: What will the world and the weather look like in a hundred years?

FO: Everything depends very strongly on the decisions we make in the next decade. Weather changes are very fast with emissions. We still absolutely have the power in our hands to shape the future we want to live in.

Dr Friederike Otto is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, and Co-Lead of World Weather Attribution (WWA)

Find out more: worldweatherattribution.org

Steam cooking can preserve the nutritional value and flavour of delicate vegetables such as mushrooms

The ancient art of steam cooking has gained new impetus with the revolution in healthy and mindful cuisine. Lisa Jayne Harris looks at the artful kitchen innovations from design-led German luxury appliance maker, and chefs’ favourite, Gaggenau

Alice B. Toklas, the celebrated 20th-century literary salon hostess, had one golden rule for cooking: “one must respect the quality and flavour of the ingredients”. Steaming is the most direct way to achieve her objective; it is an efficient way to cook that leaves the food tasting exclusively of itself. Just consider the simple excellence of steamed asparagus with French butter, one of Toklas’s stand-by dishes for entertaining.

Phil Fanning, the executive chef and owner of restaurant Paris House in Woburn and Gaggenau culinary partner, agrees: “You’ve got nowhere to hide with steam: It’s all about the quality of ingredients.” This is essential when you are working with delicate seasonal vegetables like asparagus, new potatoes or peas, but it is just as significant with good quality meat, baked goods or pastry.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

However, healthier eating is another powerful motivator behind the steamed food trend. Boiling vegetables reduces much of their nutritional qualities, such as vitamins C and B1, and other mineral salts readily dissolve in water. Lightly steaming does not disturb the food’s cellular structure or its aromatic compositions the way boiling does, so you preserve more vitamins as well as the colour and texture for a more health-conscious cuisine. “Gentle steam cooking can actually improve the nutrient status of food like asparagus, spinach and tomatoes,” advises registered nutritional therapist, Catherine Arnold, “It makes their nutrients more bio-available to the body.”

Gaggenau’s 400 and 200 series combi-steam ovens are ideal for the precise cooking of seafood

Gaggenau has pioneered steam cooking in the home for the past 20 years and continues to do so, including combination steam ovens: “Whether you’re cooking in pure steam, or in combination with traditional heat, you’re getting the health benefits of steam cooking, as it maintains food’s nutrients, colour and shape,” says Gaggenau’s category manager, Simon Plumbridge. Steam can improve other healthy eating habits such as juicing, too: “Our juice extraction setting gently steams hard-skinned citrus fruit such as oranges, so you get a much higher juice yield without impacting nutrients.”

Steam cooking is also gaining traction with chefs and home cooks because of the innovations in steam-cooking technology. For all its benefits – puffed soufflés, sumptuous bread, those crisp layers in a croissant – mastering the technique used to require an intimidating level of precision. Today, keen cooks are investing in internal temperature probes, gadgets and state-of-the-art appliances to emulate high-end restaurants at home. “The UK’s food scene has massively improved in the past 30 to 40 years, and this growth in skill and quality is reflected in passionate home chefs’ kitchens too,” Fanning reflects. Our private kitchens are becoming more technologically advanced, and ovens that enable amateurs to cook like professionals are both a luxury and an enabler of creativity.

Embracing both the old and the new makes us all better cooks. “Lots of traditional techniques benefit from having precise control over the humidity,” says Fanning. “Take bread for example. For the perfect crusty baguette, you need about 30 per cent humidity for the first five minutes and then very little for the remaining bake. In a traditional convection oven that requires guesswork, but it’s easily and consistently achieved in a combi-steam oven.” Brands like Gaggenau are making this trend for precision steam cooking more accessible. Their combi-steam ovens can be controlled to within one degree, which continually revises the estimated cooking time based on temperature-probe readings from three different sensors. There is no more guessing: “Steam in its basic principle is an ancient way of cooking,” says Plumbridge. “But controlling the level of steam in combination with a fan is only achieved by modern technology – and that’s what brings professional results into the domestic home.”

Read more: Fashion designer Erdem Moralıoğlu’s guide to east London

Steam is also about convenience; rather than waiting for an oven to preheat, a good steam oven heats to temperature immediately. When you combine that with smart, Wi-Fi-enabled technology that lets you control the oven remotely from your office, or even set the bread to prove whilst you’re watching TV, you have all the benefits of ancient cooking just a voice command away. “Connectivity in the home has a lot of momentum at the moment,” Plumbridge observes, “But we’re more interested in future-proofing, so our ovens have the capacity to integrate with apps on any system such as Alexa or Cornflake smart homes.”

As much as new food trends are about keeping pace with technology, steam cooking also allows you to take your time. Next generation combi-steam ovens can sous-vide for up to almost 24 hours on a mains-connected water system or 11 hours with a tank, and cooking meat low and slow with a good level of humidity means it won’t be subjected to heat expansion and contraction, allowing for a more tender and juicy dish. Chefs also use steam to impart more subtle flavours into a dish, laying herbs under a piece of salmon to infuse the fish or steaming couscous in a traditional couscoussier, in which spices, onions and meat cook in the lower compartment and impart their flavour to the grains above.

“Remember that with a combi oven, steam doesn’t have to be 100ºC,” Fanning advises. “You want to cook vegetables as quickly as possible at that temperature, but steaming a piece of turbot at 60ºC or even lower will give you a much more delicate result. Oxtail or lamb shanks can be very gently cooked sous-vide in a combi-steam oven for hours with virtually no chance of overcooking, and duck legs, pork belly, haricot beans or lentils – if vacuum packed with a fat or oil – can be very gently and accurately made as a confit.”

Icelanders have steamed their bread buried next to hot springs for generations and Chinese steaming baskets have been piled with fluffy rice buns and hot dumplings for thousands of years. Steam cooking might be an ancient art, but revolutionary technology, a modern regard for putting ingredients first and a drive to lighten up our diets means that the technique is equally relevant today. True innovation combines the heritage of centuries of steam cooking with precision and performance that inspires. “That’s why Gaggenau ovens are all hand finished,” Plumbridge says. “Only when you piece a product together by hand, the good old-fashioned way, are you actually putting soul into a product. And that’s what really means something to people.”

Gaggenau’s factory on the French-German border

Precision Engineering

Darius Sanai takes a rare tour of the Gaggenau factory, pictured above, on the French-German border, and is struck by the melding of industry and creativity

The huge sheet of matte-silver metal looks, somehow, tempting and edible as it sits on the machine bed, like a giant slice of space-age food about to be sliced and diced. Lasers home in on a pattern of points on the sheet, and an instant later, it has a precise latticework of holes and is being washed clean. A few metres away, an operator is in charge of a machine that bends metal. It bends it a tiny bit, almost invisibly, but the bend makes all the difference, our guide explains, as it allows the finished product a smooth, textured finish with no sharp edges.

There is a lot of this in the Gaggenau factory; a lot of working with metal, bending and shaping it, machining it, turning it from sheets, delivered through an entry doorway in one building, into the slick kitchen appliances so beloved by professional chefs.

Yet metalwork was not what I expected when walking into the factory of a manufacturer of the world’s leading kitchens. It’s hard to know exactly what to expect; my experience of factories is confined to manufacturers of cars and watches. Both of these are very obviously made of metal in a way high-end ovens, cloaked in a kitchen design and so proud of their electronics and technology, are not. Yet there is far more metalworking going on at Gaggenau than in, for example, the Mercedes-Benz factory at Sindelfingen an hour’s drive to the east, or the IWC watch manufacture at Schaffhausen an hour’s drive to the south.

Read more: Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar & the artistic revival of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

Perhaps this ought not to be surprising. We are after all in a real factory, rather than a mere assembly plant where components made elsewhere are put together. Gaggenau may now be synonymous with expensive homes, but, as a timeline in the visitor experience centre where we had arrived earlier demonstrated, it has a history in metal. It was founded in 1683 as Eisenwerke Gaggenau, an ironworks which made everything from agricultural machinery to road signs, by Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden. Gaggenau itself is a town in the Black Forest of Germany, which, catalysed by von Baden, became a significant industrial centre and still houses one of the biggest Mercedes-Benz factories.

Gaggenau also made stoves, and eventually specialised in the high-end, highly designed, highly technical kitchen appliances it creates today, eventually moving to its current site from its original home. From the sloping road leading to the current factory in Lipsheim, you can see the curved outline of the Black Forest clearly. “I live there, it takes 30 minutes to cycle in every day,” one of our hosts tells me cheerily. The fact that he lives in Germany and we are just across the border in France’s Alsace is irrelevant: this is the new Europe, and there is, in effect, no border.

It’s a scenic setting for a factory, and also an interesting one: just down the road is Bugatti’s factory (really, a very chic assembly plant), so you could in theory pick up your Chiron and then watch your new steam oven being made. (Actually, the factory tours are not yet open to the public, which makes it even more special.)

The factory is a series of buildings each of which is filled with numerous sections and stations doing different creative activities. Gaggenau’s production process is still very manual; there are 350 workers, many of them trained in astonishingly particular skills pertaining to components or electronics of particular products. There is an air of extreme concentration among the small pods of workers, but unlike in watch manufactures, you don’t get the sense that you are the nth tour to visit that day. Workers are not slickly trained to respond to your questions; some of them are so lost in concentration in operating a particular piece of hot, huge or smelly machinery that they seem surprised to see you there.

What does remind me of a watch factory, or perhaps a pharmaceutical firm, is a ‘clean room’, which we observe from the outside. The room, which sits in a corner of the factory, and the people inside, assembling delicate electrical components of Gaggenau ovens, look like characters in a sci-fi movie of their own.

There is, in another section of the factory, a testing station, where every creation is subject to testing on its accuracy, function, and so on. I lingered a minute or two here, eager to see a malfunctioning multi-thousand-euro oven chucked on a scrapheap (or actually, returned to production to be corrected), but it didn’t happen.

The tour ended and we walked back to the Experience Centre, with its view of the Vosges and walls of the latest steam ovens, slick and architectural, beauty made out of, if not exactly chaos in the factory but certainly industrial creativity. More interesting than any watch manufacture I have been to.

Find out more: gaggenau.com/gb

This article was originally published in the Summer 2020 Issue, out now.