Electronic Pop for the Surveillance Era

Holly Herndon’s collaborator for her new album, “PROTO,” is an artificial neural network that she taught to sing.
Herndon sitting at a table.
Herndon aspires to see technology as neither the best thing ever nor the worst.Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker

The artist and scholar Holly Herndon describes the laptop as “the most intimate instrument that we’ve ever seen.” It doesn’t just facilitate the creation of art—it’s a device that connects us to the world, a surface that’s as familiar as our own flesh, a thing that we entrust with our secrets and memories, a machine that we fall asleep cradling. Herndon makes experimental pop music, the result of tinkering and testing, as she chases ideas about the tech-obsessed present. That her experiments occasionally produce songs that are club-friendly can feel like an accident, a bug rather than a feature. In 2015, Herndon released “Platform,” an album that contemplates surveillance by sampling the sounds of everyday life—a refrigerator door, a Skype session. On the track “Home,” an unconventional breakup song, she imagines a relationship with an N.S.A. officer who spies on her through her laptop.

Many of us are resigned to the fact that our realities are made up of relationships—with companies and platforms, devices and accounts—that are conducted on uncertain terms. It’s the kind of thinking that leads people to cover the camera on their computer while passively volunteering for other forms of monitoring. Herndon’s work questions whether our relationship with technology has to traffic in such fear and weariness. She became infatuated with electronic music during a high-school exchange program, when she left Johnson City, Tennessee, for Berlin. She went on to study electronic music at Mills College, and she recently completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her interest in the interplay between computer programs and humans, in a variety of settings, helped make some of her previous albums, such as “Movement” (2012) and “Platform,” amenable to dance floors and seminar classrooms alike.

Herndon’s new album, “PROTO,” is the result of a collaboration with a two-foot-tall gaming PC, which houses an artificial neural network that she designed with her husband, the artist Mat Dryhurst. For the past two years, they have been teaching this “AI baby,” which they named Spawn and refer to using female pronouns, how to use her voice. They trained Spawn by talking and singing to her. Herndon, Dryhurst, and Spawn’s “godfather,” the artist Jules LaPlace, even formed a choir that would perform hymns for her. In time, Spawn began to produce sounds that weren’t built on sampling. We often say that people find their voice; Spawn iterated hers.

Herndon’s singing is full of operatic swells and icy whispers—it’s what marks her music as intimate and human, despite the digital melee around her. On “Platform,” she endeavored to make songs meant to trigger autonomous sensory meridian response, or A.S.M.R., which is usually experienced as a pleasurable, involuntary tingling. She often sounds as if she were trying to breathe with, or subsume herself within, imposing machines, to figure out how they might braid together as one. On “PROTO,” that process is made concrete as she sings with Spawn, whose voice retains an eerie, frayed, metallic quality, something like a swarm of bees. These moments are a jarring contrast to the album’s snippets of the training sessions in which Herndon and her human collaborators sang hymns. The recordings are pretty and timeless, a group of people settling on a shared vibration, and they produce a kind of material effect that Spawn is incapable of. Spawn’s contributions, by contrast, are harsh and weird, aspiring only to absolute newness. One of the album’s most chilling songs is “Godmother,” in which Spawn “sings” a vocal-free track by the Indiana dance-music producer Jlin, whose songs tend to be beautifully skittish. Spawn approximates these turbulent rhythms with moans, nervous chattering, and machine-gun-like tsk-tsks, sounding a bit like someone working through an exorcism.

“We have all kinds of new emotions and new feelings that weren’t even possible before, because of the new ways we’re connected with each other,” Herndon recently told the BBC. “And we need to find new art forms to express that.” This tension has always been at the heart of Herndon’s music; it’s impossible to say whether the big, clubby tunes she sometimes makes are by design or by accident. Some of the best songs on “PROTO” share this quality. “Eternal” soars and dips like a good dance song, Herndon pushing a triumphant hook while Spawn wails obliviously in the background. You could easily listen to Herndon’s music without understanding how it’s made, and much of it shows a good grasp of what is currently popular—synth lines worm their way through booming, chattering, low-end percussion, providing hits of loud-quiet-loud drama.

But other songs linger in a kind of dense, digital murk—the ether from which Spawn came—and raise some fascinating questions. Do voices make us human? Do we own the sound of our own voice? And, as robot ethicists have begun wondering, is it possible to exploit a machine? Hatsune Miku, a holographic Japanese pop idol, makes hit records in Japan and tours the world, yet she isn’t paid.

Herndon’s music seems to resist moments of ease; in time, this feels like the point. “PROTO” is at times difficult to listen to, because Spawn is still evolving, learning the expectations of the world. The erratic nature of it all gives the album a disturbingly human feel—it’s challenging and odd. When a child is learning to speak, she takes a while to pick up the rhythms of language, the syntax of sense. It’s up to those tasked with caring for Spawn to allow her to grow and flourish. But the expectations are unclear—after all, Spawn is hardly a pretty name.

Herndon’s desire to see technology as neither the best thing ever nor the worst marks her as unusual, given the divisiveness and normalized dread of our times. It feels optimistic to present A.I. as a way of making us feel more human.

The lure of art has always rested in how it captivates us in unexpected ways. The popular fear of algorithms reflects the anxiety that our lives will simply become patterned according to a program—that our autonomy will evaporate as computers tell us what songs we will like, when we need to buy more toilet paper, or what move we should make in a chess game.

In this context, a seeming glitch, like the rise of the Atlanta rapper Lil Nas X, offers delight. Owing to his grasp of streaming algorithms and what makes things go viral, Lil Nas X got his single, “Old Town Road,” atop the country charts, to the chagrin of the genre’s purists. “Old Town Road” is currently one of the most popular songs in the nation, leading some people to wonder how schemes to engineer chart success, based on a knowledge of how to manipulate clunky genre categories, or song length, will affect the sound of pop.

More likely, the future will be shaped by companies like Endel, a startup specializing in “personalized, sound-based, adaptive environments.” In March, Warner Music Group struck a deal with Endel to release albums based on its algorithms, which make mellow mood music that’s supposed to conform to listeners, taking into account everything from their heart rate to the weather and the time of day. Where Spawn’s music is clunky and weird, Endel’s is beautiful, like the pioneering ambient works of Brian Eno. Yet there’s something frightening about the way Endel’s music is meant to affect its listeners—shaping mood or boosting productivity—in such careful, unobtrusive ways.

If we think of “data” as stimuli, or inspiration, and an “algorithm” as a defined process, then the interaction between art and computing can seem less forbidding. Later this month, the French-American jazz pianist Dan Tepfer will release “Natural Machines,” a series of duets with an algorithm. A few years ago, he began playing with a Yamaha piano of the kind that you often see playing itself in hotel lobbies. Tepfer wrote a series of algorithms designed to respond to his improvisations, producing a more dynamic range of sounds than his two hands could make on their own. The resulting compositions are often lovely, in a jaggedly hypnotic way, yet they lack some of the chaos and blemish of human collaboration. They are the sort of thing you might see in a Google commercial.

Tepfer’s work is a modern update of what Eno dubbed “generative music”—compositions that could go on forever, evolving according to a set of predetermined rules. But, as software plays an increasingly central part in our lives, and the notion of “hacking” extends to everything from accumulating credit-card rewards to brewing the perfect cup of coffee, the idea of collaborating with computers has taken on a different feel. In the past few years, something called “algorave” has emerged in Europe. The term, coined by the artist Alex McLean, refers to dance parties with “live coding,” including displays of strings of code being edited in real time.

Much of the music coming out of the algorave world resembles that of Autechre and Aphex Twin, dance-music innovators of the eighties and nineties whose work drew on algorithms and stretched the boundaries of texture and rhythm. A key element of algorave is that it exists largely as live performance, since so much of it involves amateur experimentation. Electronic music of this sort is often difficult to improvise, but one doesn’t need to be an engineer to understand the basic coding commands that distinguish a big drop from a slow, aching one. There’s an almost parodic geekiness to the genre—artists altering lines of code with a flourish, showing their work on a screen. The music rises and falls according to unpredictable rhythms, creating a messy, twitchy symphony of bleeps. And in that intertwining of energies, from a power adapter to moving bodies, there’s something fleeting and new. ♦