Sónar 2023 gets underway with captivating performances and futuristic inventions

Sónar by Day brought alternative, electronic, house, indie, and rock fans from around the globe to Plaça d’Espanya, just a stone's throw from Barcelona city center. The first day of this three-day festival saw acts such as Black Coffee, Manuka Honey and Erika de Casier take to the stage. Meanwhile, the lineup for the second day includes The Blessed Madonna, Desert, Musa Keys and Universal Everything.

Running from 11 am to 10 pm, there are over 70 activities for festival goers to take part in during Sónar by Day, including a wide variety of free science, art and technology expositions as part of Sónar+D’s Project Area. 

The theme of this year’s Sónar+D is “The impact of AI on the Arts”. This was incorporated by the expositions in a variety of ways. 

A large-scale sculpture of a wasp venom protein was made by Antony Nevin in conjunction with the Barcelona Institute for Research and Biomedicine. 

“I was thinking about the way AI is now folding proteins and the way that that is changing science,” Nevin told Catalan News, and wanting to communicate the sheer magnitude of all the processes happening within us that we might not realize. “For me it was a lot about the idea of scale, so when I was looking in a microscope I felt like I was looking at a universe.”

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center also made an appearance at the event with a dissemination piece explaining how AI systems like Chat GPT work. They took 30 years of lyrics from songs by past Sónar performers and analyzed how the systems categorized them. 

Fernando Cucchietti, leader of the BSC Data Analytics and Visualization group told Catalan News about the moment they knew their project was going somewhere. “The first thing we did was a check by separating the lyrics by language. It did, which is a good sign as songs that are written in English are more similar to each other than songs written in Spanish or German.” The project is called EXPLAIN chat.in.a.box and those that visit the website can explore all of the group’s findings.

The festivities at Sónar by Day will continue on Saturday, with Sónar by Night making its 2023 debut today with acts like BICEP live, Solomun and Peggy Gou.