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Musical agency and collaboration in the digital age

In 2019, the musician Holly Herndon released her third full-length album, Proto. In addition to input from two other human artists, the album had a fourth collaborator: an artificial neural network named Spawn. The software had been trained over several years to generate and manipulate the cavernous choral soundscapes that brought Proto widespread critical acclaim. Spawn’s role in each stage of the music-making process was neither completely predictable nor completely under Herndon’s control; her vocal contribution – its tone, pitch, rhythm and dynamics – was often novel, original and surprising.1 Herndon describes Spawn as ‘a performer ... an ensemble member. So I would say that I collaborated with a human and an inhuman ensemble’ (Funai 2019). Here, we consider how seriously we ought to take assertions like this one. Can we really conceive of AI systems as legitimate collaborators in the skilled project of making art? Do they have the kinds of creative agency, autonomy and expressive power that characterize membership of an artistic ensemble?2 7