Hum’s Codex
8 channel audio – Installation/Performance
Exhibitions
- Artengine, Arts Court Ottawa, Pique – December 2025
Hum’s Codex is a multi-hour, multi-speaker immersive performance-installation that explores the confluence of mysticism, artificial intelligence, and devotional practice through generative music and spatial audio. Drawing on his background in Religious Studies, Ben’s project reframes society’s relationship with technology as a site of mystic focus. At the project’s heart is a custom Python-based generative musical notation system developed through collaboration with AI chatbots, working over 50+ hours to code an originally conceived program using Open AI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The generative system produces four-voice polyphonic compositions, designed with key musical elements: mood-influenced phrase structures, advanced harmonic systems, and over fifty controllable parameters including humanization, articulation variations, and a “negative space engine” for dynamic sparsity control. This program creates the musical notation that drives the performance.
Presented and performed in the round over multiple hours, the work references devotional religious traditions. The generative engine provides the ‘text’ – musical notation created by the program – which is interpreted by the performer through its triggering of synthesizers, samplers, and acoustic instruments. Embodying a “hermeneutics of sound” analogous to mystic interpretation of sacred texts, the performer becomes a living reader of algorithmic scripture.
The piece is performed with a custom-built hardware controller, co-designed and built by Arturo Brisindi, featuring multiple joysticks that spatialize sound in real time. This allows the performer to move each musical voice fluidly through a multi-speaker surround system.
Hum’s Codex positions emerging technology as contemporary sacred text: complex, wondrous, and demanding critical interpretation. It invites audiences to freely enter and exit, experiencing the piece longitudinally throughout Pique. The sonic landscape shifts between meditative drones, frenetic counterpoint, and immersive spatial movement.
