Margazhi with an AI twist: What does Madrasana have up its sleeve this year for the music season?

Madrasana's Margazhi Festival is back with a twist: AI-generated images of artists, a 40-member acapella group, and a unique auditorium for pristine audio quality. Founder Mahesh Venkateswaran is experimenting with generative AI to add "new flavor" to the festival, while artist Charumathi Raghuraman praises the production value. With 14 shows over a week, Madrasana's 2023 Festival promises to be an innovative and melodious experience.

“Try it with me once…just once. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” I don’t know if Madrasana founder Mahesh Venkateswaran is convincing me or himself, but colour me intrigued.

He goes on, as if he’s leading a guided meditation. “Close one eye. Squint the other, and take your phone away. What do you see?”

It takes me a minute…but I see what he’s been saying all along. Ramakrishnan Murthy’s face emerges from the haze of Chennai flower market, the vague outline of a tambura confirming my hesitant guess.

It is all part of Venkateswaran’s latest innovative ploy, an add-on to Madrasana’s usual Margazhi festival that year after year, continues to reinvent itself. This time , he takes hold of the recent invention that has the world polarised — AI, or artificial intelligence.

Over the last two weeks, Venkateswaran has announced the line up of artists via social media in a whimsical tease. Three images of slightly blurry sketches of artists’ profiles, superimposed over a generic background — a display of fireworks, for instance — were unveiled, challenging Madrasana’s followers to ‘guess the artist.’ The answer was revealed a day later, the image slowly transforming into each artist’s identity.

“I used generative AI — it’s like a virtual artist that can create new content such as images, music, or text based on patterns it has learnt from existing data,” Venkateswaran explains. He was just experimenting, he says, having fun with AI technology in an attempt to add ‘new flavor’ to the annual festival.

Violinist Kamalakiran Vinjamuri, who will be performing as part of this year’s festival had collaborated for the first time with Madrasana last season in a duet recording with fellow violinist Sruti Sarathy for the organization’s YouTube channel. The draw, he says, is ‘the innovation, not to mention the interaction between the digital era and the age-old classical art form.’