17 May 2019

Sound artist uses artificial intelligence to create album

From RNZ Music, 1:45 pm on 17 May 2019

By teaching a machine to sing with an ensemble of voices, Holly Herndon has created an otherworldly album that presents a utopian vision of how technology can co-exist with humanity.

Holly Herndon - Proto

Holly Herndon - Proto Photo: 4AD

“It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote. It’s something experimental musician Holly Herndon has quoted frequently in interviews about her new album Proto.

It’s appropriate too, given the album does provide a new vision of the future where the balance of power - between the corporation and the individual - is reimagined.

A central feature of Proto is Herndon’s digital creation, Spawn – an artificial intelligence programme developed as part of her PhD. Spawn is, for want of a better word, a vocal contributor.

The programme is fed and taught by an ensemble of singers, including Herndon. Herndon combines the human and machine singing into an otherworldly weirdness which is totally captivating.

  • Song Crush Ep 16: Holly Herndon, Rhiannon Giddens, MorMor
  • Although they’re eerie, Spawn’s vocal contributions are also uplifting. It’s an alternative vision of technology where, rather than harvesting data anonymously from passive social media users, for example, Spawn works alongside and grows with its human colleagues.

    It would be easy to get carried away with the artificial intelligence aspect of Proto, but Herndon addresses this on the album's expansive fourth track 'Eternal' which opens with the lines “Love / Physical love.” Spawn, despite being a leading force at the album’s heart, is Herndon’s passenger all the while.

    You can sense a touch of naivete in the machine as it sings about human experiences. Rather than being our future overlords (Terminator, I, Robot, etc.), machines are placed here as child-like and curious.

    One track, 'Godmother', sees Herndon feed Spawn stems from experimental artist Jlin which forces her to react in interesting and unexpected ways. It's a call and response where Jlin’s sparse instrumentals are punctuated with silences.

    Spawn follows the silences in kind, giving rise to something akin to a child's mimicking of what it hears and sees. The human component dictates the path, and the machine follows.

    Proto provides a utopian vision of technological communities which harks back to earlier, pre-Facebook days, but also offers a way forward. It calls into question the ways major technology firms use our anonymised data to dictate content delivery on platforms like Spotify and Netflix.

    Herndon’s partner and collaborator Mat Dryhurst is active in this field of thought and especially critical of the platform capitalism of apps like Spotify. Songwriters and producers today face the pressure of garnering a sufficient number of “listens” and, in doing so, must draw in listeners within the first 30 seconds of a track.

    The music, then, reflects the logic of the system. We see this in all digital spaces which become monopolised by few companies. This article will be tacked with a search-engine friendly headline to please Google’s algorithm, for instance.

    The intersection between creativity and the needs and wants of the digital system is effectively decomposing art and turning music, film, and television into a culture industry.

    Consumers have a role to play in this. Pop music and television has reached such a high saturation point in our information landscape that to criticise it, or ignore it, is seen as “elitism”.

    That's despite the fact that engaging with it only serves the literal elites and propels culture toward a more homogenised, easily accessible from. Marginal content is disregarded in favour of a hedonistic mass culture which is increasingly shaped by algorithms that tell us, if you liked that - you’ll like this.

    Proto imagines something new, where excellence is developed by humans leading the technology rather than the other way around. By bringing Spawn into an ensemble of voices whether in a folk tradition ('Frontier'), or ambient electronica ('Crawler'), Herndon redirects the predominant flow of technology power and has human creativity lead the way forward.

    Related:
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  • Restoring the first recorded computer music
  • The era of artificial intelligence in New Zealand
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