Artists at the forefront of AI

Despite the numerous AI platforms which serve up routes to auto-generate functional music, many artists who have overtly worked with AI have approached the concept via more individual means.

Take Holly Herndon, the Berlin-based composer and musicologist who recently created her own intelligent musical accomplice. Dubbed ‘Spawn’, this vocal-sample generator was taught by Herndon and partner Mat Dryhurst to reproduce a bank of vocal-types (including her own) via months of training its complex neural network. Spawn was able to organically add vocals to tracks, the process is still finding its feet: “AI is not that smart, it’s very low fidelity, it’s not real time, it’s very slow and unwieldy. Spawn can take more than 24 hours to process someone’s vocal input. On the other hand, it has some unique capabilities that are pretty exciting-slash-scary. The AI can extract the logic of something outside its operator’s own logic and re-create it. This is entirely new for computer music.”