Personal Comissioned

Network Bending

Techniques: Network Bending, Neural Audio Synthesis, Pure Data, Max/MSP, Workshops

Network Bending: workshop, performance and bending interfaces
Network Bending: workshops, performance, and the Pure Data and Max interfaces

Circuit bending, the practice of rewiring sound-making electronics against their intended design, has long treated failure and misuse as places of musical invention. Reed Ghazala, one of its pioneers, described it through the idea of an "immediate canvas": changes are made intuitively, by ear, without first understanding how the circuit works.

Network Bending carries this ethos into neural audio synthesis. A trained model is defined by its architecture and by a vast set of numbers, weights and biases, learned from data. Bending the network means reaching into those numbers while the model plays and rewriting them by hand. The sound drifts away from what the model was built to do, and on the way opens onto strange sounds that would otherwise stay locked inside its intended function. Instability, breakdown and opacity become compositional material.

Pure Data interface for bending the weights of a RAVE model
Bending interface in Pure Data: redrawing the weights of a RAVE encoder layer

The term itself is not new: Terence Broad and colleagues coined network bending for the expressive manipulation of deep generative models, working on their inner activations. This project takes its own route, intervening in the parameters themselves and keeping the immediate canvas within reach: little computing power, and no machine learning expertise needed to start.

Network Bending works as a compositional practice, a teaching tool, and a way of questioning AI systems that usually arrive as finished, closed products. Opening a model up and breaking it by hand turns a black box into something that can be played, misused and argued with.

Since 2024 the practice has travelled through workshops at AMRO in Linz and ICLC in Barcelona, and through an open-source Pure Data tool. Some people have taken up the idea and built upon it in various directions:

Network Bending workshop at AMRO 2024
Network Bending workshop @ AMRO 2024, Linz. Photo: Violetta Wakolbinger

Links

Previous Appearances

  • 31.05.25 Workshop @ ICLC 2025, Barcelona
  • 05.24 Workshop @ AMRO 2024, Linz
  • Used in Seven Manifolds and Broken Forecasts

Video Documentation

Seven Manifolds, performed with network bending @ +RAIN 2024, Barcelona