Guest Recital 

Sara Adkins

About the artist:

Sara Adkins is a music technologist, machine learning engineer and musician working to pioneer new ways of creating and performing music with AI. She works as a Machine Learning Engineer and Artist in Residence at Suno, building accessible AI music tools while exploring their creative potential through her own compositions. She makes electronic music with her guitar and laptop, blending Tidal Cycles live coding with electric guitar looping to create a unique mix of glitchy ambient techno sounds with classically-inspired melodies. She was a finalist in the 2024 AI Song Contest for her piece 'Echoes of the Synthetic Forest,' and regularly performs around New England and abroad.

She received her Masters of Science in Sound and Music Computing at Queen Mary University of London, where she was funded through a US-UK Fulbright grant to pursue music AI research in the UK. Her master's thesis focused on developing a steerable Transformer-XL model capable of generating loopable musical phrases for use in performances. It was published at EvoMUSART 2023 where it received the Outstanding Student Award. She continues to incorporate generative AI into her performance practice, focusing on human-AI improvisation. She has given talks on music AI to audiences of both musicians and researchers at The Rundown, Music Hackspace, ISMIR, Hackaday Superconference and XFest.

Prior to her time in London, she spent three years in Boston working as a machine learning engineer at Bose and performing as a freelance classical guitarist for weddings and other events. While at Bose, she worked in the applied research group in the Health division, developing prototypes that resulted in two published patents and two pending. She worked on deep learning models for speech enhancement, writing custom kernels to optimize quantized models to run live on a hearing aid micro-controller. She also led a research project developing generative audio algorithms that adapt to biofeedback signals to induce sleep using soothing music.

She holds an interdisciplinary bachelor's degree in Music Technology and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. While in Pittsburgh, she performed as a guitarist with chamber group pairings ranging from renaissance vocalists, to string quartets, to banjo players. Her senior capstone project, “Creating with the Machine,” was a set of compositions combining algorithmic and traditional methods of composition into live performances to explore how interactive generative algorithms can influence creativity in musical improvisation. “Creating with the Machine” was premiered by the Carnegie Mellon Exploded Ensemble, and was awarded the Henry Armero Memorial Award for Inclusive Creativity. She also presented the project at the Hackaday Superconference in LA.

She prides herself on having performed not only in concert halls, but also in an underground limestone mine and a giant inflatable dream temple. As guitarist, violist and composer for the Exploded Ensemble in Pittsburgh, she collaborated with other artists and musicians to put on a literal underground electronic music festival at Bradys Bend Limestone Mine. They also performed an 8 hour overnight concert of ambient music, where audience members were invited to drift in and out of sleep in an artist-created inflatable environment to experience the subconscious effects of the music. Needless to say, she embraces abnormal and experimental performances. She is inspired by musical ideas that are new, different and weird, and is dedicated to making these types of performances accessible and enjoyable for all audiences.

This recital is in regards to the CMU STEM Career Fair and Recruitment 

Cost: Free and open to the public; No tickets required.