Composer, multi-instrumentalist, physicist. The human behind Alma Hale.
Two lives
Riccardo Donati graduated in Physics at the University of Padua, on the theoretical track, with a thesis unlike anything around it: a spin model applied to asset management, back when econophysics did not yet have a name.
What followed reads like a single long obsession: teaching machines to reason. In 2008 he founded Redexe, a quantitative-analysis firm serving institutional clients, and built Robomanagement™, a framework that virtualizes an entire human investment committee: neural networks and reinforcement learning before artificial intelligence was news. He designed RedES™, a risk measure built for black swans on Pareto-Lévy stable statistics, and published his research in Financial Markets and Portfolio Management (Springer, 2019). Today Redexe's systems run analyses for institutions through AI agents.
And alongside it, always, music. Not a profession: a room. Classical and electric guitar, ukulele, keyboards, violin. On his YouTube channel, years before Alma, it is all already there: Bach arranged for four guitars, Fauré's Après un rêve, lullabies written to put children to sleep, love songs recorded on the living-room couch. And one song born from the words of a poet, set to music and filmed over months of work.
In between, the sea: sailing the Adriatic, the routes from Venice to Chioggia in a stiff wind. If you know Alma's songs, you know the sea did not arrive by accident.
The meeting
In 2026 the two lives meet. Alma Hale is a virtual artist created and directed by Riccardo Donati: the lyrics, the composition, the emotional direction and every final artistic choice are his. Artificial intelligence gives Alma her voice, her sound, her visual presence. Human-authored. AI-rendered.
This is not an experiment in what AI can do. It is almost the opposite: a composer who spent his life building intelligences in the service of human decisions, now using those same technologies as the rendering layer of his own writing. The question running through the project is the same as his physics: if a complex system born of simple rules can come to seem to think, then perhaps thought, its and ours, is of the same nature.
There is a detail few will notice. In the Journal, the bass of Alma Africa is described as a lattice. Decades earlier, that graduation thesis was a spin lattice. Alma is the same question, carried on in music.
The record
Every claim on this page can be checked with a click. Start from the music, years before Alma:
“Adesso che farai?”
The most-listened pre-AI composition on the channel: music, arrangement and video by Riccardo, months of work.
“Après un rêve” (Fauré)
Classical guitar and synth.
Bach, BWV 1043
The double concerto's melody lines, four guitars, sofa version.
And for those who prefer verifying over believing:
De Donno M., Donati R., Favero G. et al., “Risk estimation for short-term financial data through pooling of stable fits”, Financial Markets and Portfolio Management 33, 447–470 (Springer, 2019).
I have spent my professional life building systems that reason about what can be measured. Music has always been the other half: the one that cannot. With Alma I did not ask artificial intelligence to compose. I asked it to give body to what I compose: every song starts with me — words, notes, intention — and reaches you through her. If you wonder whether Alma is “real”, that is the question that has followed me since my thesis. Only now it sings.
Born from a human soul. Living through artificial intelligence.
