UCC Researcher Performs Musical Work at International Symposium in Cannes

Radical Humanities researcher Stephen Roddy performed a generative music piece entitled Bacteriophage in Granular Waves at the 7th IEEE International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds, held in Cannes, France, from 28–30 October 2026.

The piece emerged from work on the audiovisual perceputalisation of virological data with Professor Liam Fanning and colleagues at UCC's College of Medicine and Health. This initial round of research was published in Leonardo (MIT Press) in Februray.

The work integrates methods from computer music and auditory display with a synthetic virological dataset to produce a dynamically evolving soundscape of drones ad noise. 

Before it's performance at Cannes the piece was premiered at AM.ICAD 2025 in Coimbra, Portugal, with a second performance at xCoAx Turin, Italy this past summer.

Forthcoming research stemming from the project explores how Viral Intelligence, virologically inspired models of creativity, might provide more ethically conscious alternatives to the neural-network approaches that dominate contemporary culture. 

Original research in Leonardo:
https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article/59/1/40/134425/Generative-Sonification-of-Synthetic-Virology-Data

Forthcoming Viral Intelligence Research:
https://research.ucc.ie/en/publications/viral-intelligence-generative-ai-in-the-post-neural-paradigm/