Thanks to her advocacy around the unifying potentials of tech, Herndon has a reputation as a techno-utopian optimist that she feels is undeserved. “It makes me sound like a Silicon Valley shill! I think it’s pretty clear that we have a critical approach to technology.”
She gives an example of the potential problems technology can cause: “We haven’t yet figured out how to deal with intellectual property [in music] and AI is like if a sample could sprout legs and run. It is recording technology 2.0, and we don’t have an ethical framework.”
Forget problematic hologram tours – neural-net voice models could soon make it possible for musical heroes to record wholly new songs from beyond the grave. Holly quotes Miles Davis’s fear of “artistic necrophilia”, meant in the sense that every generation should redefine sound for themselves. “Otherwise we’ll get this recursive feedback loop,” she says, “where we can’t imagine a future that’s different because we’re always regurgitating the past.”
Instead, Holly’s vision of the future is to make the human visible within the machine. On Swim, the last song completed for the album, the human and non-human members of the ensemble are at their most seamlessly, serenely unified. “They really occupy the same space,” she beams. It’s the pinnacle of years of research, and has already transformed their expectations for further projects. “Working with AI has made me appreciate the human body; we’re such amazing sensors,” Holly laughs. “Our eyes and ears and all this stuff you can’t encapsulate in a media file … it really makes you appreciate your own meat sack.”