Imagined Presence by Olivier Alary
What will be left of our time after we're gone?
An artificial entity attempts to remember our existence.
Imagined Presence is a long-form acousmatic composition that explores the sonic footprint of contemporary human existence through the lens of artificial intelligence. In this work, Olivier Alary imagines an AI reconstructing the auditory memory of humanity: the hum of cities, the resonance of empty rooms, the echoes of vanished lives.
None of these sounds ever truly existed; they are hallucinations, synthetic memories produced by neural networks trained on the residue of human perception. Composed entirely from AI-generated material, the piece unfolds as a single immersive continuum where mechanical and organic textures intertwine and dissolve into one another.
Familiar sounds, such as voices, machinery, music surface briefly before dissolving into spectral harmonics and electronic haze. Through this interplay, Imagined Presence evokes the melancholic beauty of a civilization remembered only through the distortions of its own technological mirror.
The project was conceived as a creative dialogue with neural networks, approaching AI not as a tool but as a collaborator. Over the past two years, Alary generated thousands of sounds, organizing them as carefully as field recordings. The structure of the piece grew from conversations with AI chatbots about the possible disappearance of humanity and the sonic traces we might leave behind.
With Imagined Presence, Alary extends this trajectory into the realm of artificial cognition, crafting an imaginary archaeology of sound, an echo of human presence remembered by machines.
Tracklist
| 1. | Imagined Presence | 33:44 |
Credits
Generated, composed and produced by Olivier Alary
Mixed and mastered by Johannes Malfatti
Cover artwork by Gregory Chatonsky
Thank you: Gregory Chatonsky, Johannes Malfatti, Pascal Teixeira and Christian Di Vito
Love and gratitude to Matías, Julián, Karina, my friends, and all my family.
License
CC BY-NC 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.
Olivier Alary is a Montreal-based musician and composer. Trained in architecture, sonic arts and
instrumental composition, Olivier is interested in exploring the grey area between music and
noise. For the past fifteen years, he has provided soundtrack for over sixty feature-length film. In parallel of his film work, he has released albums on 130701, LINE and Superpang.