HOLLY HERNDON
Listen to Herndon’s 2012 EP, Movement, and you might file it under ‘experimental’. During its production, the electronic avant-garde musician was an academic by day, a laptop performer by night and programming her own processors and instruments along the way.
For her third full-length studio album, PROTO, she is exploring new musical worlds opened up by AI. She’s created her own machine intelligence called Spawn that can reinterpret and resynthesise voices; it lives in a high-spec gaming computer. Here, the Tennessean electronic artist explains the impact that working with an AI has on the compositional process and why she thinks her latest record is pop music, albeit a warped version of it.
ARTIFICIAL EXPLORATIONS
On the reasoning behind developing an AI, Herndon explains: “I’m interested in emerging technology and how it affects our daily life. In order to understand its capability and to have a fully formed opinion on it, I like to get my hands dirty and understand what it is.
“It’s something that’s been in the air for the last couple of years,” she says. It all starts with what’s coming out of the research institutes, she explains. “A new program or a new kind of architecture will be released, and then all the nerds scramble to figure out how to
