"In the 20th century, the site of media generation—the paper and pen where music was written—was the artistic act. With protocol art, the creative act happens upstream of media generation. It's creating the rule set and conditions in which art is made. We treat each step in the model-making process as a creative intervention moment."
"I often write music for training—music not necessarily for human ears but for a computer to learn something. We were inspired by Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval composer. We wanted to pretend as if polyphony had existed when she was alive. We started with a model of her compositions and added rule sets so it could generate polyphony in her style."
"AI just makes it visible. Creativity has always been collective. The making of the dataset is part of the artwork."
Holly Herndon, trained in both music and computer science, pioneered the use of machine learning in music composition. She describes her work as protocol art, where creativity happens upstream of media generation through designing datasets and rule sets that guide AI model creation. Rather than viewing the final output as the artistic act, Herndon treats each step in model-making as a creative intervention. Her approach makes visible what she believes has always been true: creativity is fundamentally collective. She collaborates with her partner Mat Dryhurst to train custom AI models that allow others to perform as her, democratizing artistic expression through technology.
#ai-and-machine-learning-in-music #protocol-art #collective-creativity #computational-composition #dataset-design-as-artistic-practice
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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