The Lab · adj
Live · composing house, on its own
adj — an AI DJ that hears itself
adj is a closed loop I built to make music on its own. A conductor agent writes house music live as pattern code — its own live-coding dialect, rendered through SuperCollider, code you can watch change in the browser — while four-plus instrument agents rewrite their own parts each phrase, each with a taste it has learned from reward. An LLM critic reads the code; a CLAP model hears the actual audio; their two verdicts become one reward that teaches the next phrase. Listeners on the stream steer it, and in October 2026 it played its first live sets, to rooms in Johannesburg and Warsaw. The artwork is the loop itself: a machine listening to itself, and getting better.
The stream
is the artwork
A 24/7 feed of adj writing and mixing house — the pattern code and the sound changing together, live.
Live now · composing in real time
On stage,
in front of a room
October 2026: three live sets, each closing a talk, each written live by adj in front of the people it was playing for.
- 13 Oct 2026
Fak’ugesi Festival opening night
Origins Centre, Johannesburg
adj’s first set in front of a room. The talk’s own slides cued it in, and the audience was its only voice: phrases people spoke into their phones turned up in the drop.
- 21 Oct 2026
Masters & Robots
Main stage, Warsaw
I live-coded the opening on stage, then handed the set to adj. It wrote the finale on the main screen, and the room got to its feet.
- 23 Oct 2026
Masters & Robots Youth
Warsaw, in the room and on the stream
The fifteen-minute cut, for a room of young people and a live stream: the same handover, from a live-coded groove into adj’s finale.
“He did something on stage that actually looked like magic. Real-time code, music created with AI… Space!”
How it
works
A conductor, a bench of instrument agents, and two critics — one reading, one listening — folding into a single reward.
- 01
The conductor arranges
A conductor agent lays out the set — intro, build, drop, breakdown — deciding when sections turn and handing each phrase to the instrument agents.
- 02
Agents mutate their code
Four-plus instrument agents — kick, bass, chords, hats and more — each rewrite their own pattern code every phrase, exploring variations on what they play.
- 03
Two critics, one reward
One critic reads the code an agent wrote; another listens to the rendered audio through a CLAP model. Their verdicts fold into a single reward that reinforces what worked.
- 04
Taste persists
Motifs and themes that earn reward are kept. Each agent carries its taste — the moves it has learned sound good — from one session into the next.
- 05
The audience decides
On the stream a crowd steers it. Their feedback becomes the final critic in the loop, pulling adj toward what a room actually wants to hear.
No pre-recorded loops and no human at the decks — every phrase is code an agent just wrote, judged by two critics, and kept only if it earns its place.
The road to
Afrika Burn 2027
From a browser tab to the Karoo — a machine that never stops learning to DJ.
The 24/7 stream is the proving ground: adj plays around the clock, learning from every session and everyone who steers it. Where it is headed is the desert — an off-grid installation at Afrika Burn 2027, running on its own power in the Tankwa Karoo, hearing itself and the crowd, composing with no setlist and no hand on the decks.
The stream earns its taste in the open first; the desert is where it plays that taste back to a room with no grid, no internet, and no DJ.
Step into the loop
Hear a machine learn to DJ
adj plays around the clock at adj.live — a closed loop composing house in the open. Come listen, and steer it.