Profile

Content of Reading:

1. Introductory Presentation

2. Apophatic Composition

3. Instruments/Voices and Acoustic Ecology

4. Human-ΑΙ Collaboration in Music Creation (Machine Learning/AI and Instruments)

5. Sound Art/Soundscape Composition/Installations

6. TempTrack Art 

1. Introductory Presentation

I am a composer whose work unfolds across the boundaries of instrumental composition, acoustic ecology, sound art, and machine learning. My artistic vision is rooted in what I call Apophatic Composition and Apophatic Spectralism—an aesthetic that both breaks with classical structural procedures and draws deeply on mystical theology and sacred traditions, especially through concepts such as eschatological becoming, apophaticism, and perichoresis. These ideas, drawn from Orthodox thought, are not for me abstract metaphors but structural principles and experiential conditions, shaping the way sound, silence, and continuity are organized.

In my instrumental works, I often explore Absolute Continuity, a technique I developed during my doctoral research, where sound becomes unbroken and orchestration dissolves into a continuous field of perception. My music seeks to generate a meditative state of listening, where the act of hearing itself takes on an apophatic dimension—an intense focus that leads beyond sound into silence.

Alongside my spectral–apophatic explorations, I have developed a compositional language that merges classical instruments and voices (including traditional laments and experimental vocal techniques) with environmental recordings—animal sounds, natural soundscapes, and urban noise. Here, instruments, voices, and ecological recordings act as equal partners, forming dialogues between the human and the non-human, the composed and the found.

In recent years, I have also engaged with Machine Learning and AI as a co-compositional force. Using Max/MSP and Markov models, I create hybrid forms where human-written material and algorithmic responses alternate, overlap, and transform. Through these projects, I investigate authorship, abstraction, and variation at the boundary between human intentionality and computational generation.

My work in Sound Art and site-specific installation extends these concerns into space, memory, and context, with soundscapes that echo the histories and ontologies of places and objects. Concepts such as TempTrack Art, where sound segments travel across different works as “readymade” sonic objects, reflect my engagement with the ontology of the arts and with recontextualization as an artistic gesture.

Across all these domains—instrumental, ecological, digital, or spatial—my music remains united by a single orientation: to create spaces of heightened listening and mystical encounter, where sound, silence, and perception converge.

 

2. Apophatic Composition
Apophatic Spectralism and Absolute Continuity

My music suggests a complete break with the past and at the same time a most deeply connection with it: break in terms of classical structural procedures, connection in terms of traditional sacred concepts related to structural procedures. Another important factor is that this procedures are applied in practice through structural modelling based on the perception of acoustic phenomena (phycoacoustics). The most extreme example of this attitude is the Absolute Continuity Technique/Attitude which I have developed during my PhD.

More specifically, my music is the product of an attempt to see Contemporary Composition under the prism of Mystical Theology (Orthodox Christianity). Certain concepts of the mystic thought, such as, eschatological becoming, apophaticism and perichoresis (St Maximus the Confessor) are keys to this process. These concepts are not abstract ideas of some sort of poetic value; on the contrary, they are conceptual preoccupations related to human experience and they are related to the aesthetic concerns of my compositions. Eschatological Becoming finds its structural application to my pieces ‘Cardiogram’ and ‘Absolute Continuity’ where the sound is absolute continuous, something that destroys any idea of orchestration and counterpoint in the most rigid way (far more than Ligeti’s pieces) and along with extended techniques creates a timbral style with a strong sense of meditative power that I call Apophatic Spectralism (with a certain reference to Romanian Spectral School) or even more general, Apophatic Composition.

Apophatic Composition, with all its aspects, focuses on listening/hearing as experience, which according to my interpretation, requires an apophatic attitude from the listener, an apophatic perception of acoustic phenomena. For this, I use the modelling of acoustic phenomena (phycoacoustics) for the creation of structural events which help/lead the listener to a certain meditative experience. As an example can be seen the last minute of my String Quartet ‘Cardiogram’, where a very long Glissando which fades out for more than a minute is followed by Silence. This structuring, along with the long duration of this simple dynamic motion, forces the Nous to focus so much, that when the silence comes the Nous is still trying to ‘cutch’/listen the sound, forgetting/negating all the sounds of the environment. This is Not Cage’s Silence. Its literally Silence. From this perspective, my acoustic music can (loosely) be considered as a sort of ‘Instrumental Sound Art’.

4. Human-ΑΙ Collaboration in Music Creation  (Machine Learning/AI and Instruments)

My works curently explore a hybrid compositional language at the intersection of human creativity and algorithmic generation. They combine elements of modernism, cubism-inspired abstraction, and structural variation, with machine learning serving not merely as a tool but as a co-composer. My first project consists of three pieces released on bandcamp (https://dimitrisbakas1975.bandcamp.com/).

• The first pieceAI/Machine Learning – Piano Dialogue creates a dialogical form, alternating between human-written piano parts and AI-generated responses. The left/right stereo separation reinforces this duality, allowing the listener to perceive composition as a conversation between human intentionality and algorithmic transformation.

• The second piece Machine Learning/AI Variations II extends an earlier work of “abstract cubism,” expanding its structural cubes through machine learning. Here, silence becomes space for AI-generated “cubes,” doubling the architecture from three to six, and suggesting a collaborative cubist montage of form.

• The third piece, Machine Learning/AI Variations I, based on variations on a theme by Theodore Antoniou, is more conventional in sound yet intentionally chosen to highlight the machine learning tool’s intervention. The style here is less about radical abstraction and more about clarity of process, making the algorithm’s contributions audible and analytically traceable.