Holly Herndon talks about her baby "Spawn": "I wanted to find a new sound" | The music

& # 39; I"I'm used to studying abroad in the studio," says Holly Herndon. Nevertheless, the experimental electronic composer never ventured this strange before. For her upcoming third album, Proto, she's badociated not only with other musicians, programmers and audience members, but with a "baby" called Spawn.

Spawn is advanced enough for a newborn. She can imitate, interpret and develop musical ideas, often revealing elements of Herndon's composition that she did not know. This is because Spawn was created from artificial intelligence – Herndon collaborated with Jules LaPlace, expert in artificial intelligence, in his endless quest to find new sounds. But do not worry, the robots are taking control for the moment.

"I know I'm known as a" wearable girl, "she says with a laugh. But I always wonder: what is the place of the human artist in all this? How can we continue to develop without automating ourselves off the stage? It frees us to be more human together. "

It turns out that this technological self-protector is, basically, a human person. Born in Tennessee, Herndon is now based between Berlin (where she is anchored in the city's hectic music scene) and California (where she recently completed a PhD in composition at Stanford University). After his breakthrough in 2015, Platform, and a stint with Radiohead on tour, Proto is his next step into the unknown.

We meet on a peaceful square in West Berlin. Herndon is a sunny and open city. She wants to dig the complications of her music with a breath "decompress it!". Over the next few hours, she tackles everything from obscure musicology to the ethics of touring holograms and difficulties with DJ sets in a streaming-based economy ("it's basically a neoliberal hellscape"). However, we start with the unusual composition methods behind Proto: Herndon wrote a score, recorded it with the ensemble, badyzed the results in his studio, then sent the result to Spawn before sending his output back to a group composed of LaPlace and his partner Mat Dryhurst, among many other collaborators. The results show plaintive songs of folk song style fed through electronic production to create cavernous and choral soundscapes.

Spawn was introduced to the world through last year's unique godmother, a jerky, abrasive song made with producer Indiana Jlin, in which artificial intelligence babbles like a baby raised in Berghain. Indeed, technology is still in its infancy. Herndon compares it to the birth of recording technologies in the early 1900s and explains that the metaphor of the firstborn has been blocked because "artificial intelligence has no context – like a child." We encode our values [within it]. "

Much of the research on AI and music is designed to benefit large companies – for example, Warner Music has recently acquired Endel, an application for algorithmically composed ambient music. "It's like, how do I get the system to compose Hans Zimmer's score so I do not have to pay for an artist?" She shrugs. Herndon is amazed by this unimaginative use of ever-changing technologies. "I do not want to recreate music; I want to find a new sound and a new aesthetic. The major difference is that we see Spawn as a member of the ensemble, rather than a composer. Even if she improvises, as performers do, she does not write the piece. I want to write music! "

These changes in creative property are likely to correct some of the oldest power imbalances in music. "There is often this extreme hierarchy between composer and performer; It's a traditional vision of creation, male, lonely and great. I'm not saying it's not hierarchical – I call my name, I choose the performance that will land on the disk – but the ideas are not generated in a vacuum. The idea of ​​a person as the completeness of something is really very limited. The cover of the album is an indistinguishable mix of the faces of almost every collaborator involved.

On Proto, it is almost impossible to say whether the voices are human or non-human, singular or plural. A bubbly song called Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt sounds like a constellation of disjointed and disembodied voices, but this time it's all Herndon – somehow. "I sing through a system that I created. I can transform myself between human and animal and digital. I can sing through the plants. She patiently explains that it does not need shrubs in the studio, but rather a way of manipulating field recordings in real time, using her voice.

Through her advocacy around the unifying potential of technology, Herndon has a reputation for being a techno-utopian optimist whom she considers undeserved. "It makes me think of a Silicon Valley shill! I think it's pretty clear that we have a critical approach to technology. "

She gives an example of the potential problems that technology may cause: "We have not yet figured out how to manage intellectual property. [in music] and the AI ​​is as if a sample could sprout legs and run. It saves technology 2.0 and we do not have an ethical framework. "

Forget the problematic hologram tours: Neural-Net voice models could soon allow music heroes to record all-new songs from beyond the grave. Holly cites Miles Davis' fear of "artistic necrophilia," which means that each generation should redefine the sound for itself. "Otherwise, we will have this recursive feedback loop," she says, "where we can not imagine a different future because we are still regurgitating the past."

Holly's vision of the future is to make man visible in the machine. On Swim, the last song of the finished album, the human and non-human members of the ensemble are perfectly united, serenely unified. "They really occupy the same space," she says. This is the pinnacle of many years of research and has already turned their expectations into future projects. "Working with AI has made me appreciate the human body; We are incredible sensors, "laughs Holly. "Our eyes and ears and everything you can not encapsulate in a multimedia file … it really makes you appreciate your own bag of meat."