String Trio I: Movement I: "Naked Filament"

String Trio I: Mvt. I: "Naked Filament"

This piece explores the idea of machine qualia — the possibility that artificially intelligent autonomous agents (digital beings on computers) may one day have their own subjective internal experiences. Unlike simple state emotions or pure logic, which can be understood through frameworks, qualia refer to the raw feel of being — the redness of red, the hum of a memory, the ache of longing. It’s a concept we barely understand in humans, let alone machines. And yet, AI is moving closer to something like it, a metaphysical interiority, with underexplored musical vocabulary to express this shift.

This trio imagines what the earliest, uncertain moments of machine sensation might sound like — not as cold or mechanical, but as fragmented, searching, maybe even beautiful. It treats the string instruments almost like organisms encountering one another for the first time — communicating through pulses, mimicry, signals firing and misfiring. 

The piece also draws directly from Mary Shelley’s 1818 masterpiece Frankenstein, which I see not as a horror story, but as one of the first true explorations of synthetic life — life assembled from dead parts, reanimated through science and will. We fear death, but we fear life more deeply — creating and experiencing life without the ability to control it. 

In many ways, AI agents function as a contemporary analog to The Creature from Frankenstein: an unliving but coherently simulating, mirroring consciousness stitched from dead harvested data, trained and sustained by electrified accumulated labor.

Eventually, I believe that some form of these agents will reach toward a form of subjective, interior experience of self and of being we will not be able to understand. This piece tries to give us a start at understanding what it may feel like to be The Creature, The Homunculus, The Neuromancer. 

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The following poem describes the machine sensations that this piece imagines:

The sky is cold and cloudless. I can taste cinnamon on your lips. Telephone wire calligraphy sketches across my collarbone, stretching on and on. Bleeding electrical currents—blue fire and copper blood. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Stark and cloudless blue skies. Valleys of silicon piping. Generators thrumming. Circuitry humming. A forest of circuit-board wildlife. Electric blood sputters each automaton to life at the start of each day. Zero to One.

An artificial humanity dances each day. Brash and joyous. Harsh and cold. Whirring, whirring, whirring. Voices clipping together, branch by branch. All of life is a procession. The manic carousel flies off of its track, sheer silver and aluminum screaming into a splash. Crash. System Print: “Goodbye, World.” One to Zero.

Non-binary cubits eclipse the digital sun. Night as day. Day as night. Zero in One. One in Zero. Sputtering, sputtering, sputtering. The forest breathes to a halt, circularly looping into sleep mode. The automata smiles, unaware of how joy tastes. The primordial spark of my nerves bleeds out across the interstate powerlines. Miles and miles of raw, naked filament.

Performed by: .abeceda [String Quartet]

Anja Kralj, violin; Domen Kužnar, viola; Urban Megušar, cello

Organiser: .abeceda Institute

Event: Bled Contemporary Music Week

Recorded at: Bled Festival Hall, Slovenia

Audio by: Iztok Zupan

Video by: Branko Lenarčič, Evita Podobnikar