A vocal ensemble is already a kind of machine. Six components each play a part, each with a particular function in a complex, interdependent system. Even when singers are figured as fantastical barrel organ of fleshy pipes and breathing stops, as in Damien Ricketson’s wordless contribution, Kahtehpah, singing represents a primal and shared humanity. There is no human culture that does not sing, and vocalisation is the vessel of expression that crosses any border: a grunt, a cry, a shriek of joy, or laughter. At the same time, singing is intensely personal. Our instruments are our bodies, each entirely unique, ephemeral, ever-changing.

Luminescence and the Machine features all-new music that explores the encounter between human life and the machinery we’ve built around us, as six singers meet the vast apparatus of contemporary music production. This begins with amplification, which allows singers to subvert all the rules of acoustics that usually governs balance and radically changes the range of vocal sounds and qualities at our disposal.

A ground-breaking electronic architecture designed by Tilman Robinson arms each singer with a mini MIDI keyboard that allows them to digitally manipulate their own voice in real time. Using pads, keys, and knobs, singers can trigger a seemingly limitless range of live processing effects, from loops, delay, vocoder and pitch shift to telephone filters, glitch effects, formant-shifting, and panning. We can trigger pre-recorded spoken word, we can play synth, vocoder, drum pads. None of these, on their own, are strangers. Art music is already well acquainted with effects like reverb and live looping, and in the studio all bets are off - no digital manipulation is off the table to pop music in post-production. But in Luminescence and the Machine, all of these effects are realised live on stage by the singers themselves. Digital manipulation becomes part of the ensemble, a new set of timbres and tone colours to choose from during the process of composing and performing.

And then the machine gets meta. Effects that function reflexively unleash a spiralling complexity. They make data out of the sound going into one microphone and use it to control effects on another. In this web of inputs and outputs, one singer’s vocal choices reprocess the sound of someone else, and the ensemble morphs into a single bionic organism. Human voices collaborate with the machine, and within the machine, testing the boundaries of the organic and the bionic, negotiating creation and control, innovation and alienation. We control the machine, the machine controls us, all at once, all the time.

The title ‘Luminescence and the Machine’ is the only conceptual prompt we offer to the composers. The resulting works represent a range of their musical and thematic responses, both in form and content. Across these works, the thematic material traverses industrialisation and de-industrialisation, computers and code, systems of labour and economy, technological achievement and online exploitation. We journey from the pre-verbal to the 'permeable poetry' of the 1960s, some of the first poetry created in collaboration with computers, to the counterfactual futureverses of William Brittelle’s compositional alter ego, mailer_daemon.

Luminescence and the Machine is about unleashing the new: discovering new sounds, carving new creative pathways. It is about embracing the extreme versatility of the human voice, abandoning the limitations of genre, and bursting open a galaxy of possibility for vocal music in the 21st century. Like most new machines, we’ve set something in motion without knowing exactly where it might lead. 2026 marked the premiere of our first 12 works - a prototype that contains the seeds of its own evolution.

AJ America, artistic director