Live coder, alumna of the Music Technology Group at UPF and researcher in the field of music and algorithms, Anna Xambó has spent years exploring the limits of digital sound from a very particular place: extreme minimalism, low frequencies, compulsive rhythms and noisy textures. She used to play the bass; now her instrument of choice is code. Her live-coding projects are as singular and wonderful as she is (in one of them she makes music by navigating in real-time through the sounds of the Freesound platform, which says a lot about her advocacy of open-source philosophy). 

She has released four solo albums, the most recent being detuning a tuning, which came out on Carpal Tunnel in 2023, and is Senior Lecturer in Sound and Music Computing at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, where she leads the Computational Sonic Arts Lab, and is also the is lead researcher on Sensing the Forest, a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that gives the forest a voice through IoT, acoustic ecology and creative AI.Since last year she has also been one of the mentors and facilitators of our annual AI Performance Playground hacklab.

In this talk, Xambó presents her practices of live-coding and sampling as a privileged path for real-time creation and improvisation, working both with her own sounds and with collective archives. AI algorithms, within this framework, do not generate the final result: they help to search, retrieve and discover new sounds and patterns, opening up possibilities for unexpected interactions between humans, machines, code, data and audience. For Xambó, using AI in music is not a question of efficiency but of positioning, and she believes that any artist who wants to explore these tools must do so with real technical knowledge, and without avoiding uncomfortable questions about data, transparency and human creativity. 

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