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They named it Spawn.
Spawn is nascent machine intelligence, or AI.
But Herndons 2019 album,Proto, contains the first recorded debut of an AI on a pop-music album.
Here, she explains how she did it.
Its really dull because it ties us to this particular time thats no longer of the moment.
The first six months were pretty uninteresting.
It can never go outside the canon.
After six months, we got slightly more interesting results.
That started to happen when I stopped usingTensorFlow, a program mostly for visual learning.
This involves turning sound files into spectragrams so that AI can see them.
But in terms of timbre, it was very lo-fi and it all sounded the same.
There was nothing exciting about the output.
We switched to SampleRNN, which is used for voice recognition.
The one snag is, if its training on my voice, it tends to get stuck on vowels.
It required way more audio.
We used hours of my voice.
It takes my voice speaking and singing and creates a model of what it sounds like.
Spawn would digest that information, which could take anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes.
Wed all be on Slack together and wed get updates like: Spawn released a new track.
She would do that all the time.
Wed click through and listen to it and, most of the time, our response was,eh.
And then I clicked on the one used for Birth and went, Yes!
That was the first time I was excited by the outcome.Because generally, Spawn has such a limited perspective.
Its both super-impressive and like … terrible.
Its likeGod, youre so dumb!
Spawn has very real limitations.
Reverb is really difficult.
It couldnt understand the difference between the shapes of the sounds and their echoes.
Spawn imitates an audience clapping:
She likes transients.
That, to us, is new.
The result is somewhat clever, logical, and most importantly, unexpected.
Spawn performs the rhythm section of the song Frontier.
I wasnt training her with beatboxing.
Its so embarrassing that this is what she spat out!
I dont know if it was a good idea, but it was an idea.
It wasnt something I told her specifically to do.
I tried singing Godmother, and I just cant.
Infinite Aretha Franklin records may be the better example!
