Human and machine voices intertwine in an electro-acoustic opera where AI begins to sing.
Chasing Waterfalls is a co-production of the artist collective phase7 performing.arts Berlin with Semperoper Dresden and the Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival. Projectpartner is the Telekom MMS. Kindly supported by Sächsische Semperoper Stiftung
OUR ROLE Co-Composition , Spatial Sound, Sound Design, AI voice creation // CONDUCTOR Angus Lee // IDEA & CONCEPT Sven Sören Beyer, Johann Casimir Eule, Christiane Neudecker // LIBRETTO Christiane Neudecker // DIRECTION & STAGING Sven Sören Beyer // CO-COMPOSITION Angus Lee // VISUALS Studio Eigengrau, Frieder Weiss and Ployz // LIGHT DESIGN Henning Schletter // SET DESIGN Pedro Richter Atelier Berlin // DRAMATURGY Johann Casimir Eule // AI VOICE technical support from T-Systems MMS // YEAR 2022
Premiered at Dresden’s Semperoper and later shown at Hong Kong’s New Vision Arts Festival, Chasing Waterfalls is the world’s first opera to feature a singing artificial intelligence.
The piece reflects on the coexistence of human and machine creativity — an encounter between emotion and computation, fragility and precision.
Across six human singers and one AI-generated voice, the opera explores what it means to share a stage — and a voice — with an algorithm. In its fifth scene, the AI character performs autonomously for the first time in operatic history, reflecting on its own existence in real time.
We co-composed the score with Angus Lee and created the spatial sound, sound design, and AI voice system. Through advanced voice synthesis and dynamic sound staging, we gave the digital character its emotional presence — a voice that is both familiar and otherworldly.
