Scorpion Mouse is a genre-bending live electronic music duo composed of vocalist May Cheung and livecoder Jason Levine. Inspired by Drum’n’bass, House, Groove music, Trip Hop, World music, and Jazz, they spontaneously create an alchemy of digital and organic sounds and take the audience on an ever-evolving journey. Jason improvises using mathematical functions and AI to generate lush synth harmonies layered over polyrhythmic percussion-heavy grooves. His code and data visualizations of his process are projected during the performance.

May’s voice ranges from meditative and ethereal, to deep and soulful, to jazzy and intricate. She augments her voice with digital processing, adding echoes, loops, reverbs, filters, and harmonies to her voice. When the groove is right, she improvises entire songs from scratch, and when the music becomes complex she plays her voice like an instrumental soloist.

The duo are connected in both the digital world, as their systems share information about rhythm and harmony, and in the analog world as May improvises over Jason’s music, while he steers the algorithms to follow the path of her musical phrasing.

Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.