Holly Herndon — Spawn — AI vocal model as collaborator (PROTO)

2019

Artists: Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst (collaborator), Jules LaPlace (technical collaborator) · Year: 2019 · Medium: AI vocal-model collaboration — Herndon trained a neural network on her own voice to generate new vocal material · Substrate: Custom neural-network training on Herndon's recorded voice; SampleRNN and subsequent architectures; PROTO album credits Spawn as a collaborator · Place: Berlin, Germany · Institution: Independent; 4AD (record label for PROTO album) Spawn is the name Holly Herndon gave to a neural network she trained on her own voice, beginning around 2018, as the central collaborator on her 2019 album PROTO. Rather than sampling or processing Herndon's voice with traditional tools, Spawn generated new vocal material from what it had learned. The album credits Spawn as a band member. Herndon's singing on PROTO coexists with Spawn's generation; you cannot always tell which is which. What PROTO argues — and what Herndon's writing and lectures around the album have argued explicitly — is that AI systems trained on an artist's own corpus can be legitimate collaborators rather than tools. The ethical framework matters. Herndon has been consistent in insisting that Spawn was trained on her own material, with consent, and that the resulting output remains a collaboration between the artist and an entity the artist built. This posture stands in explicit contrast to the later commercial generative-AI systems (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) trained on mass-scraped data without artist consent. Herndon and Dryhurst have continued to develop the Spawn framework through subsequent projects — Holly+ (2021), their Have I Been Trained? tool for artists to check whether their work has been scraped into training datasets, and ongoing advocacy for consent-based AI practice. They are, in practice, among the most thoughtful critics of extractive AI training that the contemporary music and art scenes have. Both are still working, based in Berlin. Lore Herndon earned a PhD at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics before PROTO; her technical literacy in audio signal processing is unusual among working musicians. Mat Dryhurst is her partner and creative collaborator. Jules LaPlace contributed significant technical work on the Spawn training pipeline. The PROTO album was released on 4AD in May 2019 and received substantial critical coverage in both music and technology press. Sources • Herndon, Holly — hollyherndon.com • PROTO — 4AD release (2019) • Have I Been Trained? — haveibeentrained.com