The New Bert for a new Mary Poppins - in an AI opera

Would AI be a Shepard tone always — sounding all higher and higher but creating more stress than melody? Or would it be new-world Theremin that we would need to learn with precision, complexity and invisibility? An AI Opera Maestro shares some notes.

- By Pratima H

If you were in one of the theatres in early 2025 in Indianapolis or Brooklyn New York where Prof. Scott Deal, DMA, Indiana University Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellow was about to unravel the curtains on an opera having AI as the deuteragonist - you would have felt a trill of how Mary Poppins would sway and swing in the new age. This Professor and Director, Donald Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center, Herron School of Art and Design Indiana University Indianapolis has been busy creating 'Lexia: An AI Opera' where he combined music and AI technology - and has been jamming with no one else but AVATAR, his own AI machine-learning model that improvises music alongside a live musician. A piece was born in collaboration with playwright and librettist Kat Mustatea, video artist Tanya Stolpovskaya and internationally-acclaimed soprano Tony Arnold; with what Prof. Deal composed alongside AVATAR. This piece, incidentallyor not so, explores a future 200 years ahead where Lexia, a human and The Lung, an AI device converse about climate change redefining humans. Prof. Deal is not just a brain who has been unboxing the 'next' in music technology with his research and experiments; but he is also a composer, performer and producer. Just the man to sit down with and explore the many notes of this new instrument. Would AI be the contralto or the soprano or something new altogether? Take your seat as Prof. Deal drums his fingers candidly on some important notes as An AI robot playing the Tabla better than Zakir Hussain wouldn't captivate Indian audiences. It would feel mechanical, like watching a lawn mower or chainsaw. Zakir's performances (rest in peace), however, were incredibly inspiring, filled with passion, and deeply enjoyable to experience well as some semitones around the relevance, ethics, depth, and friction of AI in this field. Blacksmiths, cars, Legends like Zakir Hussain, lawnmowers and Zeppelinhe strums a lot of strings here.