Alien Collaborators: AI as Creative Partner in Music Making

In September 2025, AIxDESIGN hosted a hands-on Open Culture Tech workshop with audiovisual artist Nicole Chufi. During the session at The Sphere, NDSM in Amsterdam, participants explored “speculative sound worlds.” You can read the full workshop description here.

 

Nicole, who works at the intersection of sound, visuals, technology, and storytelling, brought a unique approach: reverse engineering the approach to sound by incorporating conceptual visual queues for sonification, while treating AI tools as an "alien collaborator", generating unique samples that can help create an alternative sample library.

 

The session drew a diverse group—from spoken word artists with little music production experience to amateur DJs and interaction designers.

 

 

 

 

Sound World-Building as Creative Prompt

 

Nicole's methodology centers on conceptual sonification—defining the emotional and narrative framework before touching any tools.

 

For demonstration, she shared her project "Serei@" (Portuguese for both "siren" and "mermaid"), exploring feminine intuition and transformation through an underwater sound world. Her process involved establishing four elements: Place, Color/Texture, Character, and Movement/Time.

 

Built on random inputs, the workshop participants chose a conceptual world to collaboratively compose a cyberspace pirate world with blue/striped textures, hysterical/drunk movement, and pirate characters, providing the conceptual foundation for our sound co-creation.

 

You can see the workshop’s full slide deck here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tools & Workflow: Ableton, Neutone, Magenta & More

 

Participants used AI tools to generate raw samples with Neutone, Magenta, and then manipulated them extensively in Ableton's built-in functions to create unique textures through a chain of effects — what Nicole calls "making it your own."

 

Tools we used:

 

Primary Production Platform

• Ableton Live (trial version for accessibility)

 

AI-Driven Sound Tools

• Neutone Morpho - Neural audio effects and transformations
• Google Magenta Studio - AI-assisted music generation
• Google Instrument Playground - Interactive musical AI
• ElevenLabs - Voice synthesis and sound effects

 

 

 

 

Insights & Reflections: On Creativity, Constraint & Remixing

 

The workshop revealed some interesting perspectives on AI's role in music creation that challenge common assumptions about automation versus creativity.

 

Nicole positions AI not as a shortcut but as a source of novel raw materials. Musicians have always sampled from existing sources, and often used the same ones. Now, rather than using the same 500 pre-loaded samples in Ableton or grabbing drum kits from sites like Artlist or Epidemic Sound, they can create their own samples. The key insight from Nicole: AI works best when you "take it somewhere else" through manipulation and sound effects.

 

"You can use your AI fragments as-they-come - but much more interestingly: take them and manipulate it, distort it, bend it, tweak it, take it somewhere else. TREAT IT - and make it your own." – Nicole Chufi

 

Current AI audio quality is still a bit granular and needs post-processing, but this becomes an opportunity for creative intervention rather than a limitation. As one participant noted about tools like Loudly, the generated material felt too polished and poppy initially, but got way more interesting when chopped up and remixed.

 

Traditionally, creating music means building sounds step by step, almost like stacking blocks. With AI tools, the process shifts into a space of endless possibilities, where patterns can be generated in line with your own way of writing music, unique samples can be created to match exactly what you need before manipulating them further, and creative blocks can be unlocked when you’re stuck.

 

 

 

 

The session also surfaced tensions around authenticity that many artists face with AI tools. One DJ/producer initially felt using AI tools was "almost like faking it because it wasn't my own samples," but found value in treating AI as a starting point for extensive transformation. Most of it all it surfaces how very few of us, and especially not creatives, have no interest in replacing human creativity but rather about how to integrate it - if at all - meaningfully into existing practices.

 

This reminded me of the quote by Ge Wang - Stanford professor and Smule co-founder: "Why would I want to make a generative music engine when making music yourself is so joyful?".

 

Participants shared their prompting tricks, many found that leaning into creative contradictions and unlikely pairings gave the best results. Nicole suggested that, in the future, you might be able to type something like ‘a humpback whale in the forest’, while another producer imagined ‘R&B at 140 BPM’. Because these sounds and genres don’t really exist—or aren’t common in the training data—the output often becomes strange, unexpected, and surprisingly inspiring material to work with.

 

One producer asked Nicole how she chooses from the landscape of effects, tools, and prompts. “Trial & error - but I do have a clear direction of how I want things to sound like ‘mermaids’, 'metallic' or 'woody'." This suggests that especially with AI tools, having conceptual direction becomes ever more crucial for meaningful and original creative outcomes.

 

 

The backwards methodology proved powerful for participants struggling with creative blocks or limited music experience - providing creative scaffolding without constraining final outcomes. One producer reflected: "I’ve been having a huge writer block since the pandemic... this method of defining place, color, character unstuck me".

 

Looking at the (false) seemingly limitlessness and addictive design of generative AI tools that can trap you into endless generation, it seems a good time to regularly to remind ourselves of the age-old saying that “constraint breeds creativity”.

 

 

 

 

Technical accessibility emerged as a real barrier—requiring Ableton plus multiple plugins plus understanding of the AI functions is something many participants felt we wouldn’t have been able to work through without Nicole’s hand holding and patient demonstrations.

 

In the end, everyone created something complete. Regardless of technical background, all participants produced short loops and sonic sketches that reflected the shared pirate cyberspace concept while maintaining clear individual influences.

 

What's Next

 

This was the first in our series of OCT & AIxDESIGN workshop series exploring AI for musicians. Thank you Nicole for setting the tone so beautifully!

 

Keep an eye out on our channels for upcoming IRL and online sessions for music makers and sound-adjacent creative communities to tinker with AI and we hope to see you soon.

 

The "Speculative Sound Worlds" workshop was hosted by AIxDESIGN and Thunderboom Records as part of Open Culture Tech 2.0, supported by Cultuurloket DigitALL in collaboration with Sound & Vision, Superposition, Wij Doen Dingen, Bureau Moeilijke Dingen, Bedrijf de Liefde, Chagall, and Wesley Hartogs.