The Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA) has come round again. It's lovely to have it back IRL, and to attend performances and all. I'm unable to watch all the show that I want, but I can do some. I began the festival with a show by Berlin-based musician and programer Holly Herndon. I wasn't sure if I could make it to the show because Choya was unwell. But she stabilized enough for the man and I to both zip out for 1.5 hours, and she stayed at home on her own.
Titled 'Holly Herndon: PROTO' after her 2019 third full-length album, the experimental musician's work has been described as 'electronic music and avant-garde pop'. She studies computer-based technology both as an artistic medium and as a research tool. She also uses many AI voices derived from her own in her music, uses machine learning to teach her AI twin named Holly+. Pitchfork summarized the album for us,
On her third album, PROTO, she opens her process to include not just her own voice but the voices of a choral ensemble. The group includes Spawn, a “nascent machine intelligence” that runs on a modified gaming computer and was created in collaboration with AI expert Jules LaPlace. Trained to process audio, Spawn uses neural networks to riff on music she hears; Herndon, who uses she/her pronouns to refer to Spawn, considers the AI not as an instrument or a tool but as an ensemble member.
The man had no idea who Holly Herndon is, and started googling when he sat down, in the ten minutes before the show began, and stared at her stage set-up. He was intrigued. The show tonight uses gadgets thattotally fit what he's into right now — making music at home with an Ableton and Max for Live. Holly Herndon uses an Ableton, of course. Nobody would use Pro Tools nowadays for these types of music-making.
Creating music like this, she's weaving dreamscapes and leading the audiences to do vivid dreaming. It's up to an artist to add on fun elements to her show. Tonight, the focus was on the voices. There was Holly, and then on vocals — Colin Self, Albertine Sarges, digital artist + technology researcher Mat Dryhurst, and I forgot one vocalist's name. She also brought along a sound engineer. In her Singapore show, she got the audiences to sing along to contribute the data for machine learning.
The man was interested in her creation process and would have loved to see how the vocalists infused their voices with Spawn, how they did the plug-ins and such. I laughed. Wouldn't that be artists' trade secret?! In experimental music, I also thought that a black box setting would be preferable. And maybe, turn it up by a few more decibels. This was my belated birthday gift to him. It took a while to pick it out. I'm glad that he enjoyed the show.
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