Viennese band Lucy Dreams are a trio, but only two of them are human: David Reiterer and Philipp Prückl. The third member of the group is called Lucy, and she’s artificial – but NOT an AI in the current sense of the word.
“She’s a system of chained audio effects, hardware pedals and processors that we’ve tuned ourselves over years. No neural networks, no LLMs,” Reiterer tells Music Ally. “She predates the ChatGPT explosion entirely.”
Her origin story starts back in 2019, when Reiterer and Prückl were “fooling around in the studio” with some equipment.
“It was the middle of the night, so we chained seven effect pedals together and turned them all up to seven, eight, nine. The effects eventually worked their magic and the system started to create a vibe of its own,” he explains.
We were sending sounds into it, and all of a sudden in the white noise we started to hear patterns, an ocean of sound. We adjusted a few things, and these melodies that we found in the white noise became clearer. That was Lucy’s birth.”
Since then, Lucy Dreams has continued experimenting in order to answer the question of “can a machine help express feelings that words along can’t capture?” while ensuring that her human collaborators are still a vital part of the process.
“The process of building her was hands-on and experimental – more like learning an instrument than coding software. We use her to expand possibilities within our own creative decisions, never to ‘write us a song’. Lucy typically contributes only the initial 2-3% of a song,” says Reiterer.
“Working with Lucy feels intimate because there’s no ego in the room. No history. No judgment. She doesn’t care if I’ve been stuck on the same verse for three hours – she just keeps offering possibilities,” he adds.
“That absence of human expectation creates a strange kind of freedom. I can be vulnerable in ways I couldn’t with another person. And that vulnerability ends up in the music. I think that’s a bigger lesson: the right kind of human-machine collaboration doesn’t replace the human element – it expands it. We discover emotions we didn’t know we had.”
Lucy’s role in Lucy Dreams extends beyond recording: she is also a key presence in the group’s acclaimed live shows.
“She actively shapes visuals, structure, and real-time interaction on stage. It’s a digital performance concept where the artificial bandmember isn’t just playing back tracks – she’s speaking to the audience through the set,” says Reiterer.
“We advocate for a peaceful, inclusive and sustainable integration of tech in human evolution, all through the medium of pop music.”
What Lucy Dreams are doing with Lucy is very different to how people are using AI-music tools like Suno and Udio to generate tracks, but Reiterer says that the experience has sharpened their views on the bigger picture of AI, music and human creativity.
“Taking agency with AI in our creative life has definitely shaped how we see these debates. The skepticism around AI is valid – it exists because people use AI to replace human decision-making rather than extend it,” he says.
“Tools like Suno or Udio lose meaning once the human story disappears. For us, the line is clear: authorship, narrative, and emotional intention remain human. Lucy is a tool, not a replacement.”
- You can hear Lucy and her bandmates’ latest music on their album ‘VVVVV‘, which came out in early February.
