Luc Döbereiner is a composer, musician and researcher from Berlin whose work explores the fragility and materiality of sound. Moving between composition, improvisation, and sound synthesis, he investigates how sonic forms emerge, shift, and dissolve.
His music often combines live electronics, generative systems, and acoustic instruments to create evolving sonic dynamics that blur the line between order and noise. Influenced by computer music, early polyphony, and noise traditions, his work is characterized by continuous transformation, emergence and instability. Luc Döbereiner has performed across Europe and collaborated with ensembles such as LUX:NM, Eklekto Percussion, KNM, Schallfeld, and Vertixe Sonora. He is also active in the duos End of Text (with Ludvig Elblaus) and NOR (with Martin Lorenz). He studied at the Institute of Sonology, holds a PhD from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, and has taught and researched at many institutions throughout Europe.
Questions and Answers:
3 FACTS
1: Material can give rise to form.
2: Politics begins with the collective declaration and practice of equality.
3: Sound, as a movement that both shapes bodies and is shaped by them, allows us to perceive ourselves simultaneously as subjects and objects. It connects us to the world, revealing possibilities for sensitivity and empathy, and making perceptible the entanglement of abstract form with material bodies, living and non-living.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
The idea of being “inspired,” of spirit being breathed into one, points to a Romantic notion of art as a kind of revelation. I’m not opposed to revelation, but for me what is revealed is neither subjective interiority nor something transcendent, but the unfolding of form from the material itself. I therefore prefer to speak of the “conditioning” of a thought process. The conditions of my process are the material itself (sound in its various medial forms), computational procedures, listening, its social context and my collaborators, philosophical concepts, political thinking, and a reflection on artistic methods
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I’ve been making music since early childhood. Instruments, music technology, and records were always lying around the house. The first instrument I built was a Hohner harmonica connected to an air-mattress pump. That’s how I made my first little organ.
3. How will you integrate artificial intelligence into your project and which specific AI technologies or tools are you using?
I work with small-scale, adaptive AI systems rather than large datasets. This is a compositional but also a political question for me. Specifically, I use Hopfield networks, small MLP neural networks and k-nearest neighbor algorithms to model associative memory and adaptive listening. These systems interact with recordings of the performers’ voices, both live during the performance and pre-recorded, forming a feedback ecosystem in which human and machine memory intertwine. The AI listens, recalls, and reconstructs sound fragments, timbres and harmonic situations, thereby becoming part of a shared process of remembering and forgetting. I implement these systems in Rust, C++, and SuperCollider.
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
I associate Berlin with my childhood, but also with the way aggressive neoliberal politics and economic pressures erode public space. How what was once open, fluid, and undefined becomes increasingly commodified and fixed. This shrinking of shared, unregulated spaces reduces possibilities for both collective and individual thought, and produces very real forms of suffering.
5. What’s your favorite place in your town?
My studio.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I don’t know.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
Yesterday, I listened to “Viderunt omnes” by Pérotin, “In darkness let me dwell” by John Dowland and “Das Andere” by Horațiu Rădulescu.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’m very happy with my current collaborations. I have two duos, one with Ludvig Elblaus called “End of Text” and “NOR” with Martin Lorenz. Two nights ago I played with Clara de Asís in Vienna. I would like to intensify the work with these collaborators. But there are many friends and colleagues I’d also love to collaborate with, such as Adam Pultz and Ji Youn Kang.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
At my recent performance at Algomystica, my musical practice, the context, and the audience seemed to resonate very strongly with one another.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Technology is integral but not instrumental. I aim to turn technology from a means of control and the exercise of power (over the world including other humans) to a way of extending our aesthetic sensitivity. It’s both a medium and a subject of reflection. I’m interested in how technology shapes listening, memory, and interaction, not just in what it can produce. I design systems whose workings I want to explore, not systems that produce a pre-conceived product. Whether it’s a simple oscillator or a neural network, technology becomes aesthetically productive when it shifts the possibilities of human perception and collaboration.
11. How do you plan to present the results of your research at Radialsystem?
The main outcome is a 20-minute composition for choir and electronics, performed by the Chorwerkstatt Berlin, a choir of non-professional senior female singers. The presentation will merge human voices and AI-driven electronics within an evolving network of memories.
