Celebrating 13 years together!

We celebrate another year, accompanying all professional and amateur lutenists, luthiers, students, and all those who love and follow early music.

This year, we have been carried away by what has probably been the most impactful topic of the year: generative artificial intelligence.

The idea was to assess how far these technologies can go in understanding the lute. To do this, we asked various image creation engines (like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion) to create images of a cat playing a Renaissance lute, a Baroque lute, a theorbo, or a Baroque guitar, for example, with the goal of obtaining an image similar to those we created with Nathan Nun for our Cats & Lutes line.

The experiment has served to confirm that artificial intelligence is only as good as the data used to train it, and therefore, it clearly reflects the limited knowledge of society (and the internet, as a mirror) about early music.

The general public has a more or less blurry reference of what a lute can be like. An example of this fact are the representations of the lute in movies or video games, which are mostly not very faithful to reality.

And the result obtained with AI is nothing more than a reflection of this issue: a collection of weird pictures

But these results are only due to the fact that these artificial intelligence engines have been designed with a generalist purpose. They have been trained with very extensive data sets to achieve powerful cross-sectional knowledge.

However, they can also be trained with a specific purpose, so that it would be possible not only to generate very precise images of plucked string instruments but to achieve a much deeper knowledge of the world of the lute.

I leave this matter here for reflection and also for future posts where I will delve deeper into these issues.

For the moment, we prefer to stick to the best picture we could get from these AI engines: a cat playing a romantic guitar (kind of)

To celebrate the anniversary of Cuerdas Pulsadas, we are launching a week of discounts on our catalog. Don’t miss the opportunity to renew your strings before the end of 2023.

Once again, thank you all very much, and we wish you much health and lute for 2024.

PROMOTION DETAILS:

All our catalog will have a discounted price. As simple as that.

• This promotion will start on December 18th and finish December 25th, both inclusive.
• This promotion is compatible with the reward points system
• This promotion is not compatible with the 5% discount for orders over 200€
• This promotion is not compatible with the discount for luthiers

Depending on the category, you will find different prices though.

There are three discount tiers: