The Call with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

A collaboration between artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and Serpentine Arts Technologies, The Call proposes new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI.

“If all media is training data, including art, let’s turn the production of training data into art instead.”

The Call centres on developing new protocols and materials for the creation of choral AI models. To train the AI, Herndon and Dryhurst have composed a songbook of hymnals, singing exercises and a recording protocol, travelling with the Serpentine Arts Technologies team to record fifteen community choirs across the UK. The choristers are now part of a Data Trust experiment that allows for the distribution of power between the contributors to the training data and those who use the models.

Machine learning development (HymnAI) for songbook by Algomus, University of Lille

Songbook designed by Michael Oswell with Kees de Klein, Music typesetting by Udi Perlman

Scientific collaboration on choral AI models (Choral Diffusion) by Ircam-STMS Sound Analysis and Synthesis team (Nils Demerlé, Matéo Fayet, Robin Meier, and Philippe Esling)