There’s something soothing about how rubbish Google’s new predictive email tools are – if AI can’t work out what you want to tell your accounts department, then it won’t be organising a Terminator-style insurrection any time soon. So what hope does AI have for composing music, if bland office missives are too creatively challenging?
California-based electronic composer Holly Herndon considers this moment of slowly emergent machine learning on her third album. Alongside the musicians in her ensemble is Spawn, an AI she created with husband Mat Dryhurst and developer Jules LaPlace, that listened to what the group was composing and mimicked it to create music of its own. It’s not always clear which bits are Spawn-created, but Herndon obviously has the final say over how its contributions are used – and indeed, the whole album feels more like an announcement of human authority rather than a capitulation to machines.
The human voice is the central instrument. It may have its hard edges sheared off in big pop anthem Eternal, consonants softened into near-unintelligibility; it may glitch and fade as Spawn tries to replicate it in the call-and-response chorale Evening Shades. But it endures, tangibly human even when digitally processed. There’s even something pagan and pre-technological about the Celtic cadences on the a cappella duet Canaan, while another choral vocal passage in Crawler feels liturgical. There is perhaps a political dimension to all this: by folding herself into a multiplicity of analogue and digital voices, Herndon counters the individualism of our culture, and suggests that networked communities are just as valid as “real-life” ones.
As with her ASMR satire Lonely at the Top on her previous album, some tracks here feel more suited to the art gallery than the home stereo. But there are also bold, accessible commercial tracks, such as Alienation – imagine a power ballad produced by Jon Hopkins – and Frontier, where a crunching dancehall beat is topped with choral voices that recall Sacred Harp or Gaelic psalm singing.
Herndon counters the hysteria around AI with an album that presents it as a quizzical, cute pet on the leash of a human master: a sensitive, responsive part of the family.
