Holly Herndon normally makes electronic music. This time, she made AI. Her new album, Proto, was composed by Holly’s AI spawn (named Spawn), a program she taught play by feeding it percussion, her voice, and other sound inputs. The process sounds arduous: to make something artificially “intelligent,” you have to give it all the goods yourself, and that takes a lot of trial and error. In Spawn’s case, sticking points were the vocals, which struggled to progress beyond a monotone, and reverb, because machines can’t recognize the distinction between a sound and its echo. Lucky for you, all you have to do is listen. If you start at the beginning with “Birth,” this is going to sound like an AI album. But if you cherrypick other tracks like “Eternal,” you might just think it’s experimental electropop. Don’t skip “Godmother,” where Spawn goes ham on percussion. Art!
The journalism-of-the-week award goes to Cat Zheng, who just spent a million hours analyzing Tik Tok videos to distill the elements of a hit. On a platform where weird is rewarded, unsurprisingly, those components are mostly strange noises: One hitmaker describes his wonky vocal affect as a growl where you “hit the Juul and then you drink really hot coffee.” Beyond the Juul effect, distortion and iPhone sound quality give a song an anti-influencer, DIY feel; grabby lyrics, well grab; and beats are robust enough to anchor some pretty outrageous dancing–bonus if those beats drop heavily at some point so the dancers can do something crazy like transform into somebody else. Oh, and screams. Don’t forget screams.
It’s a wild world in there, which brands have already started to infiltrate, both with their own videos and by lifting hits for their ads. The music world is also trying to keep up. Maybe the most haunting line of the piece: “Labels are currently trying to reverse-engineer hits based on their suitability for memes and hire marketers to devise viral trends to go with songs in an effort to systemize a TikTok sound.” May the kids stay a step ahead.
What’s the opposite of the best-thing-of-the-week award? Whatever it is, Baby Shark: The Musical gets it. If you think two minutes of doo-doo-doo-dooing is too much, try 75 minutes in which three separate musical numbers are all Baby Shark— every time, the under-8 crowd goes wild. Oh, God.
More on Baby Shark: how has SmartSong, the company responsible for the song’s viral stardom, not cashed in on it more already? In part because the song itself, a camp singalong long before it was YouTubed, is public domain. So the company is building Baby Shark into a character instead; here’s their line of singing stuffed animals, for starters, which will be followed shortly by a Baby Shark TV show and movie. Or perhaps the (graciously silent) Baby Shark cereal is more to your taste. Runnnn aaa-way doo doo, doo doo doo doo, Runnnn away! Doo doo, doo doo doo doo, RUN AWAY, doo doo….
