AI

With so much going on to talk about, from the sudden decision by Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) to step down from the Senate at the end of the year, to new allegations of releases of ethylene oxide from  the Sterigenics plant in Smyrna, to forest fires in the Amazon and the Congo (fun fact: did you know that at one point in geologic time, the Amazon and the Congo were once one river?), to man's genetic predisposition toward male violence, what should we choose to discuss today?

Obviously, the fact that the band YACHT are back from a three-year absence! And with AI! 

For their forthcoming album, Chain Tripping, YACHT employed Artificial Intelligence in their songwriting process. According to their Bandcamp page:

In order to compose Chain Tripping, YACHT invented their own AI songwriting process, a journey of nearly three years. They first tried to discover any existing YACHT formulas by collaborating with engineers and creative technologists to explore their own back catalogue of 82 songs using machine learning tools. Eventually they created their own working method, painstakingly stitching meaningful fragments of plausible nonsense together from extensive, seemingly endless fields of machine-generated music and lyrics, themselves emerging from custom models created with the help of generous experts in neural networks, deep learning, and AI. 

YACHT used the NSynth, a neural synthesizer that utilizes latent space interpolation to imagine new sounds in between traditional instrumentation. YACHT's Claire Evans said, “This record is a product of a technological moment that is rapidly evolving. It taught us everything we wanted to know about ourselves: how we work, what moves us, and which ambiguities are worth leaning into. We didn’t set out to produce algorithmically-generated music that could ‘pass’ as human. We set out to make something meaningful. Something entirely our own.”

That, plus you can dance to it.  What's not to love?

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the artist Holly Herndon has gone even deeper into AI, using it not only to compose, but to also perform alongside human musicians. Her new album PROTO, consists of modern choral music.  You can't dance to it (well, I suppose you can dance to anything, but still); however, in addition to several other talented singers, her vocal ensemble includes Spawn, a “nascent machine intelligence.” Spawn runs on a modified gaming computer and uses neural networks to riff on the music it hears; Herndon considers Spawn not as an instrument or a tool but as an ensemble member.

Due to the anatomy of the throat, the human voice cannot go from one note to another without expressing the transitory notes in between; muscles need to tighten or relax, passageways need to adjust the way air moves through them. The resulting glissando is what makes singing sound natural and organic, as opposed to the sound of electronic instruments. 

The harmonies in PROTO are provided by Herndon and a chorus of human and artificial voices, digitally processed and compressed by Spawn.  The natural glissando of the human voice disappears; there is one note and then there is another, with no transition between them, yet the music does not sound unnatural. The distinction between human and digital sound becomes blurred, or as Sasha Geffen notes in Pitchfork, "it sounds like a new kind of human vocalizing, augmented by machine, not reduced by it."  The video for the song Eternal provides insight into the creative process that Herndon employs.

"Then in a certain moment I lose control and, at last, I am part of the machinery," Brian Eno sang in the 1978 song The Belldog, which seems to neatly encapsulate Herndon's ambitions.  In the same song he also anticipates folks like YACHT using AI to generate lyrics and sifting through the reams of output to select the words they like most (even the album title, Chain Tripping, was picked from seemingly endless suggestions provided by the AI). "Most of the day," he sang, "we were at the machinery, in the dark sheds that the seasons ignored. I held the levers that guided the signals to the radio, but the words I received, random code, broken fragments from before." 

Here's The Belldog, my favorite track from After The Heat.  The song is now 41 years old, but it still sounds like the future to me.