By Keith Powers

If anyone has experience negotiating the treacherous intersection of artificial intelligence and classical music, please step forward.

Enter Tod Machover.

Machover, composer and director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, has spent a lifetime seeking equilibrium between acoustic and electronic sounds. His latest attempt, already and not yet, a concerto for orchestra and electronics that engages AI as a real-time musical partner, received its world premiere Oct. 24 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Kent Nagano in Symphony Hall.

The work follows a path Machover first took half a century ago. The concerto engages the orchestra as live performers and as collaborators with his own artificial intelligence software. Machover placed a computer-managed sound enhancement system amid the orchestra (a system developed and controlled by MIT’s Manaswi Mishra) and populated Symphony Hall with surround-sound speakers.

Machover brings human intelligence, and experience, to these experiments. He spent seven years in the ’80s with Pierre Boulez’s electronic-music ensemble, IRCAM. From there he went to MIT, where he has been director of the artistically adventurous Media Lab for 45 years. His compositional studies include work with Dallapiccola, Carter, Babbitt, and Sessions.

His new concerto blends the orchestra, the AI system, and recordings in an unrepeatable live performance. The acoustic instruments play triggers and offer rudimentary improvisations; the AI software absorbs and responds. The improvisations, and the AI responses, will differ in each performance — leading to endless premieres.

Three movements are played without pause. The first foregrounds the busy and large acoustic ensemble, pitting brass and winds against the strings, with minimal AI involvement. Because of its brassy, heavily punctuated phrases and accessible energy, the movement invokes (without the AI) the best-knownConcerto for Orchestra, Bartók’s, which premiered in this same room in 1944.