From the video for Holly Herndon and Jlin’s song “Godmother,” made with Spawn. Photo: Holly Herndon/YouTube On June 21, 2017, electronic musician Holly Herndon and her husband, writer/philosopher/teacher Mat Dryhurst, welcomed a new addition to their family. They named it Spawn. “She’s an inhuman child,” Herndon tells me one afternoon, while seated in the offices of her record label, 4AD.
So much of the research into AI is trained on a very particular era of music — 1850–1950 in the western canon — where pitch and note length and rhythm are the most important. It’s really dull because it ties us to this particular time that’s no longer of the moment. We wanted Spawn to reflect our community, and we wanted to use peoples’ voices that were specific to it.
Spawn’s first words and sounds only came when we switched to a third, voice-model method. 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. I made a data set where I sang random phrases within a comfortable range for me, like:Alfalfa is healthy for you.