AI Category Archive

Steward.exe Release Their First Album

Leave a reply Jonny Hankins

On 8 April 2026 Steward.exe released their first album Humanwear Cuts, free to listen to here and across all streaming platforms. Readers in the UK can see them live as the play their first UK date on 31 May. As regular readers will know, this is a project that I am involved in myself, both as a drummer and percussionist and philosophical investigator.

Together with Luca Severino (and with live performance from Lisa Mos), we have been experimenting on ourselves and with AI, firstly exploring the technicalities of using generative AI to produce sounds and music while in parallel reflecting upon the experience.

AI is used across the board in the music industry today, not only in production and sound creation, but also during the development and execution of promotional materials and strategies. Steward is experimenting with using AI within the creative process. It is not AI generated music as we might imagine it though, but some of the source materials are AI products.

Once the sounds have been generated, they are treated in the same way that any other source might be treated. Sampled, manipulated, chopped and changed. They offer inspiration, rather than being an end product. Steward.exe uses its production skills to create from sources that may or not have been ‘artificially’ generated. Generated thanks to knowledge and technique that Steward possess.

The Steward.exe project aims to be a synthesis of sound research and ethical reflection in the age of artificial intelligence. What does it mean to use AI as part of the artistic production, rather than as a technical assistant? Can we speak of a sort of co-production? If a piece of music develops from a line that was created by AI, is it AI produced? Once the idea has been created by AI can it be forgotten? Or is the end result, regardless of the process, the ‘child’ of that first AI input?

The AI revolution is linguistic. Suno gives the possibility to anyone who wants to create their own music. They have to describe what they want, and the machinery generates music based upon the description. A movement from needing to learn how to play an instrument, to hold a note, to imagine a structure – to being able to describe what we want, to a machine that will then approximate what we are asking for. What about skill? Can we find it in the description? In the prompts? Or is that merely knowledge (or is that also not necessary)?

But reflection brings many questions. Could we see this as the democratization of music production? Who has the right to use its creation, to sell it, to gain from it? Whereas once musicians had the power to create, using their own experience and skills, anyone can now create a song. If anyone can create their own music (and market it and benefit from it) we must be witnessing change in the distribution of power, but is this a democratization or centralization? And is it detrimental to musicians? Or creativity?

And could AI agents do all of this for itself? Create its own music and its own power?

What role does professionality hold? Suno will produce a song from a few search terms, but can a user express professional knowledge and experience in those terms, and can we hear that in the resulting music? We are feeding knowledge into a machine, professional knowledge built from decades of experience. And the machine gains from our experience, it comes to embody our experience. How does this sit within ideas of professionality? And responsibility?

Can we ask similar questions of video production? I am sure we can. See this video for the Steward.exe single Blockroots Tar, AI production, complete with prompts.

Alongside raising these and many other questions, the music raises aims to show how established and experienced musicians can develop ideas that have been generated by AI. The finished product is not the product of AI, it is crafted by Luca Severino, you can hear his style in the music, it is not generic, a mash-up of previously digitized sounds, it is Luca’s sound. The rhythm reflects my style of playing, although I didn’t play it myself (with the odd exception) I can feel myself in the music. Check out the latest video here.

It’s a very personal interrogation. These AI systems have been trained on music whose intellectual property and copyright has not been respected. The black box is closed around even knowing how they have been trained, on which (whose) materials. Possibly including materials that myself and Luca have previously released. All without traceability, payment, or citation.

When we set knowledge down in book form, we acknowledge our sources. We extend previously made arguments, we do not take them as our own.

Steward.exe releases First Single

Leave a reply Jonny Hankins

On 28 October, Steward.exe released blockroots.tar, the first of a series of tracks and albums from a project that was born from the meeting between Italian composer Luca Severino and myself, Jonny Hankins. As regular readers will know, Steward.exe aims to be a synthesis of sound research and ethical reflection in the age of artificial intelligence. The project emerged in 2025 as a natural evolution of our multidisciplinary collaboration through the Giannino Bassetti Foundation, partner of this blog.

Listen to the track on your platform of choice here.

Steward.exe debuted at the N.I.N.A. Festival in Milan in 2025 with a performance integrating AI-generated compositions, live acoustic elements, and featuring performance artist Lisa Mos as a robot that is learning (through AI) to appreciate music and dance. Further shows followed, in addition to live DJ sets in club settings. The project goes beyond simple technological experimentation to become an artistic manifesto on the creative and ethical dilemmas of the digital age. Through the fusion of generative algorithms and human sensitivity, Steward.exe questions the future of art and redefines the boundaries between creator and creation, positioning itself as a pioneer of a new form of poiesis-intensive, philosophically informed electronic music. We continue to develop the concept through songs, articles, performances, and dialogues, establishing Steward.exe as a benchmark for responsible innovation in the contemporary electronic music scene.

About Luca

Luca Severino brings over a decade of experience in the international club scene to the project, with releases since 2009 on prestigious labels such as Defected and Snatch!. His transition to media composition in 2015 have seen him contribute to Netflix productions such as “Emily in Paris” and RAI productions, his most recent soundtracks including “De Occulta Imagine” by Stefano P. Testa and “René Va Alla Guerra,” the latter of which won an award at the 81st Venice Biennale. With numerous albums of music for images for international publishers, Severino has established himself as a sound architect capable of blending strong melodic elements, electronics, and innovative sound design.

And you know me.

Music, Machine and Human Relationships.

3 Replies Jonny Hankins

Following on from my last post about Error 0xHUMAN: System Overdrive, I wanted to introduce another music project that plays on the intersection between AI and musicianship. A new work by composer Zeno van den Broek premiered at the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht on 10 October with AI powered drum robots developed specifically for the show.

The robots are responsive, learning from the music as it is played by humans. They can develop their own ideas as well as respond to the music that they are emersed in.

This is a step away from playing with a pre-programmed machine, at which point the musicians are slaves to the rigidity of technology, as the technology can influence the sound produced itself.

Another aspect that I find interesting is that the musician has developed a way of communicating with the robots using gestures, very much as we ‘live’ musicians do between each other. And the robots have a light system that they themselves can use to communicate with those surrounding them. They might want to make a change in the structure or sound for example.

The robots can ask for the materials that they play to be changed (maybe from wood to metal), and they can make these requests whenever they ‘want’. The timing of requests changes too, with changes requested more or less frequently at different points by different players.

There are a lot of similarities here with the Error0X:Human project. The line between AI and machine production and human production is blurred. AI is an artistic tool that might also be seen as having its own agency. Both projects raise lots of questions about art, authorship and creativity.

There is an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw available in which the band members (the human ones) talk about their experience. One of the aspects is that the robots have names and really aren’t spoken about as if they were machines, but as band members. They have gone beyong machinery and into something that has agency. It’s a lovely article to read.

And if you can get to Bucharest on 20th September my colleague Luca Severino is bringing the Error0X:HUMAN project to a new public in a new format…. See below, on full screen.