Migrant Cloud
Operatic Explorations
By Parsa Mirhaji
Migrant Cloud is a musical exploration of Persian poetry delivered through Western operatic traditions. Four original poems. Sixteen tracks organized into two continuous albums (Migrant Cloud and Mirage Opera) with a distinct creative direction and intention: Contemporary Persian verse arranged purposefully to be projected through the elaborate machinery of Western opera. The album cover captures the essence of this experiment, two traditions, two vocabularies of transcendence, engaged in a harmonious motion.
Migrant Cloud builds on a distinguished lineage of artists bridging Persian poetry and Western classical forms. Tjeknavorian composed Persian-language operas with significant Iranian musical elements. Arash Fouladvand delivers masterful symphonic and choral productions of Persian mystical poetry (particularly Rumi) employing Western orchestration while maintaining Persian vocal aesthetics rooted in āvāz and Sufi traditions. His Bahar Ensemble performs with full orchestra but preserves the vocal character of Persian classical singing rather than adopting Verismo or Bel Canto techniques. Darya Dadvar has explored operatic techniques applied to Persian folk material. Contemporary Iranian opera singers performing in Western opera houses, including Cameron Shahbazi, have examined the sound of Persian folk songs like “Baba Karam” and “Shanehaiat” with operatic vocals.
“Migrant Cloud takes a different approach. The album experiments with introducing Farsi as an operatic language by composing original and intentional operatic verses in Persian from inception. It examines multiple operatic architectures (lyrical ballads, dramatic arcs, contemplative and urgent interpretations) to deliver Persian poetic metaphors through Western operatic idioms, while testing whether AI generation technologies can render authentic opertic phrasing across Persian phonetics.“
The poetry is Persian in style and the metaphorical universe it depicts, but structured purposefully for operatic architecture: refrains designed to swell and return, climaxes placed for dramatic arc, verses refined through iteration for the sweep and intensity of operatic voice. Western listeners hear the operatic grandeur they know, carrying poetry they have never encountered. Persian listeners hear their poetic heritage in an unfamiliar musical vessel, familiar imagery served in a new format, framed within a soundscape that authentically belongs to both traditions, Western in its musical machinery, Persian in its soul.
I wrote the original poems between 2020 and 2025, but the album became possible only when advanced AI models capable of delivering operatic productions and supporting engaged creative collaboration emerged in 2024-2025. I selected these four poems from my broader body of work for their strong metaphorical multi-layered narratives, ekphrastic on the surface, philosophical in depth, as exemplary demonstrations of complex Persian literary art forms suited to operatic architecture. Over eight months, I learned to transform them into operatic compositions through iterative AI-assisted production. The result occupies new territory: original contemporary poetry arranged specifically for Western operatic production, with commitment to Western harmonic language and operatic delivery while preserving Persian metaphor, poetic narration, linguistic integrity, and intelligibility..
Migrant Cloud consists of four poems, each exploring a distinct emotional architecture and operatic strategy. Mirage(7:54) employs wave-form architecture, multiple cycles of building and releasing across nearly eight minutes, emulating a mirage and the experience of pursuing something that perpetually recedes. Migrant Cloud (5:10) takes the opposite approach: plateau architecture, rapid build to sustained intensity held to the very end, emulating the musical structure of persistent prayer and petition. Lighthouse Within (5:51) follows classical dramatic arc, the clearest journey structure in the album: sparse opening in darkness, turbulent questioning in the middle movement, triumphant discovery at the dynamic peak delivered through a staccato unity theme where the seeker and sought integrate. Ignite Me (5:53) abandons such resolutions entirely for sustained turbulence, near-constant emotional instability reflecting a soul in crisis. The speaker does not seek; the speaker is the wound: This cold dim light, it is me.
Migrant Cloud experiments with four different operatic architectures to deliver complex poetry and metaphorical narratives coherently, with full phonetic recognizability for traditional Persian-speaking audiences, while forgoing traditional āvāz ornamentations (tahrir, dastgāh, radīf). The vocal production is Western operatic: legato lines, vibrato (wider than classical Western norms but distinct from Persian tahrir), and dramatic dynamic arcs, rather than modal improvisation.
Despite these four distinct emotional strategies, the compositions share consistent sonic DNA throughout the album. The bass-baritone voice anchors all eight tracks, moving between grounded low registers (the speaker rooted to earth in Migrant Cloud, the fire temple’s extinction in Ignite Me) and exposed high reaches (the vulnerable final bebār, the desperate mara daryāb). The cello serves as primary melodic instrument throughout, leading the sustained lamentation of Mirage and the warm resolution of Lighthouse Within. In Ignite Me, the cello-heavy outro carries the plea after the voice can no longer sustain it. Saxophone provides contemplative passages across all four works, nodding toward Persian musical sensibility and Sufi motifs while employing Western harmonic language, most prominent in the middle movements of Lighthouse Within and the meditative sections of Migrant Cloud. Piano supplies atmospheric texture: ambient arpeggios in Mirage, the fading arpeggios that close Ignite Me like dust motes settling after sunset. Most critically, bass-forward orchestration provides gravitational anchor throughout. The bass is the ground; the voice reaches upward from it; the cello and saxophone mediate between earth and sky.
Each poem exists in four musical interpretations (four poems, two continuous albums, eight tracks in each) as parallel experiments with different tempos, tonal centers, and approaches to the same lyrical arrangement. These variations invite audiences to participate in the creative experiment itself, to discover which rendering resonates more deeply, and speaks to their own experience of the poem. The multiple interpretations is intended to actively engage recipients emotionally, in this musical exploration of how the same words can yield different truths. AI-assisted production makes this experimentation possible at a scale traditional studio work cannot match.
AI generated soundscape and vocal delivery (read more…): Throughout the album, the vocals achieve 89-95% legato phrasing, smooth, connected operatic singing, while Persian phonetics survive intact. Lyric-music integration responds to semantic content consistently: climactic musical moments align with poetic discoveries, musical collapses accompany poetic dissolutions.
The AI-generated voice simulates operatic timbre but does not replicate the acoustic characteristics of trained human singers; most opera and music enthusiasts will immediately recognize its synthetic origin. Despite meticulous quality control and extensive iteration, mispronunciations and hallucinatory singing, the model generating sounds that approximate but do not match lyrics, occasionally appear across most tracks. This however, is the current edge of AI-generated music: Migrant Cloud is an honest representation of what the technology can and cannot achieve as of late 2025. read more…
Album Tracks
Mirage (Operatic Ballads 1 & 2) – اوپرای سراب
Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1874) stands as a defining work in impressionist art, capturing fleeting light and illusory images on the misty waters of Le Havre at dawn. The painting’s luminous ambiguity and evocative power inspired Mirage, an ekphrastic meditation written in 2021 to emulate the emotional journey depicted in Monet’s canvas. Mirage follows the imagery of Monet’s masterpiece: shifting horizons, mysterious waters, an eternal quest for direction, and soulfulness of sunrise (read more…)
Migrant Cloud (Operatic Rock 1 & 2) – اوپرای ابر عجول
April 2021. My dear friend and classmate at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Dr. Ali Jalalvandi, shared an image of clouds passing over a thirsty plain. I saw a story: clouds that release their rain at distant mountains while parched wildflowers watch from below (read more…)
Lighthouse Within (Operatic Ballads 1 & 2) – اوپرای فانوس دریایی
5:51 | Baritone | Strings, contemplative saxophone, timpani, staccato unity theme | G major
The immigrant’s life: a journey without compass on turbulent seas. Some reach familiar shores and call it destination. Others make home in the middle of fog and waves. The difference often lies in having someone in their lives who serves as their personal lighthouse, a beacon marking the direction of home wherever storms may drive.
This composition is for those whose beacon has gone dark (read more…)
Ignite Me (Operatic Ballads 1 & 2) – اوپرای مرا دریاب
October 2021. I stumbled on a photography of the moon on a half-cloudy night. It was the eye of the sky, swollen from weeping, surrounded by clouds pregnant with tears. The poem emerged: A wounded soul, still in pain, seeking remedy from migrant clouds (read more…)
گاهی، نگاهی 