Holly Herdon is one artist that I like who uses AI and technolgy in a particularly well balanced way. She is a composer, musician, sound artist who uses an AI model “Spawn” to generate sound for her music. When you listen to her music, it’s not immedietly obvious that this is the case — the technology is not right in front your face. In fact, they sound less “electronic” than some of their experimental music counterparts that are not as technology intensive (at least no AI) such as Ryuichi Sakamoto. Compared to other generative music technology, such as OpenAI’s Jukebox (which I played with for a while with an unsatifying level of success,) the artist still has great control over her AI model in the creation of her music, which makes them sound human while being surreal and otherworldly.
One of her most recent projects is Holly+(https://holly.plus/), which is a digital twin of hers. The audiance is welcomed to upload audio files of their own to have it be processed to her style. It is also worth mentioning that the AI model — spawn — used to create many of her music is trained with audio segments of her own and her friends’. The model is also surprisingly lightweight (compared to Jukebox(https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/), which is a transformer-based monstrosity that was trained on 1.2 millions songs and takes 10 hours to generate a short segment on Tesla V100.) So I also appriciate her work from the technical perspective.
