Holly Herndon — Holly+ — AI voice model as public infrastructure

2021

Artists: Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst · Year: 2021 · Medium: Public-facing AI voice model — anyone can upload audio to have it converted into Herndon's singing voice, with revenue shared via DAO · Substrate: Neural voice-cloning model trained on Herndon's voice; web interface at holly.plus; DAO governance for derivative-work approvals · Place: Berlin, Germany · Institution: Independent; Herndon Dryhurst Studio Holly+ (2021) is Holly Herndon's follow-up to her Spawn project. Where Spawn was a vocal AI collaborator on her own album PROTO, Holly+ is a publicly-accessible voice model: anyone can upload audio to the Holly+ web interface and have it converted into Herndon's singing voice. The resulting work is shared jointly between the original creator and Holly+ (which distributes revenue to a DAO of token-holders). The system is a deliberate experiment in what consent-based AI voice-use at public scale can look like. The project extends Herndon's earlier consent-based AI-art framework. Where commercial voice-cloning services scrape training material without consent and produce outputs without compensating the voice's original owner, Holly+ does the opposite: Herndon's own voice is explicitly shared, derivative works are licensed, revenue flows back to token-holders who approved the system's governance model. The DAO architecture — governance-token holders vote on approval of specific uses — is unusual for an AI-art project and has been cited as a possible model for broader creator-rights frameworks in AI. Holly+ has been used by hundreds of collaborators since launch, producing a substantial body of work that includes Herndon's voice while remaining the creative work of other artists. Herndon and Dryhurst have used it as a case study in their broader advocacy for consent-based AI training. Both continue to work, based in Berlin. Lore Holly Herndon is an American electronic musician who has been based in Berlin since 2014 with her partner Mat Dryhurst, also a musician and theorist. Herndon completed a PhD in music composition at Stanford in 2018 and has held the project's intellectual base in close consultation with academic AI research throughout. Holly+ — the AI-singing-voice instrument trained on Herndon's own voice — was launched in mid-2021 and explicitly licensed to other artists for use in their own work, with Herndon receiving a small percentage of resulting commercial use. The licensing model was unusual and specifically positioned against the more common "AI replaces artist" framing. Herndon and Dryhurst have continued to develop the broader Spawning project that emerged from Holly+ and now runs the haveibeentrained.com service for AI-training-data consent. Sources • Holly+ (holly.plus) • Herndon, Holly; Dryhurst, Mat — interviews and lectures • Have I Been Trained? (haveibeentrained.com)