Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Serpentine Arts Technologies invite the public to sing together from the songbook developed for The Call.
Join artists Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst and Serpentine’s Arts Technologies team for a final choral recording celebrating the closing days of their exhibition, The Call. In developing The Call, the team toured the UK, working with 15 different choirs to record a training data set for a suite of choral AI models. The choirs sang from a songbook specifically composed for AI training.
During this informal recording session, London Contemporary Voices and audience members are invited to sing from Herndon and Dryhurst’s songbook and record a final session that will be added to the choral dataset. The event includes songs and exercises performed from the songbook, insights into the songbook’s AI design, and stories from the recording tour.
Doors open at Stone Nest at 6.30pm for a 7pm start. The recording session will last approximately 90 minutes. Those who wish to sing along will join the choir—no music reading or prior experience is required (you will be prompted in situ).
The evening’s recording will be added to the UK Choral Dataset for AI training, a resource created as part of the exhibition. Serpentine is the steward of this dataset and may sublicense it only according to the terms set out by the 15 choirs involved. These terms include artistic and research purposes such as training new AI models for musical experimentation or analysing the dataset to study regional accents. Those wishing to participate in the recording session will receive further information about these terms, along with an agreement to review and sign before joining.
People who do not wish to participate can watch from the gallery at Stone Nest.
BSL interpretation is available on request. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you would like to request this.
Bios
Known for their pioneering work in music, machine learning, and ‘protocol development,’ Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon (US) and Mat Dryhurst’s (UK) expansive practice has led to precedent-setting projects where the technical systems that underwrite creative output are artworks unto themselves. Holly+ (2021), an AI clone of Herndon’s voice which can be used by anyone, has acted as a counter narrative to AI extractivism, offering artists a way forward in the wake of generative AI. Herndon and Dryhurst’s critically acclaimed musical works including Platform (2015) and PROTO (2019), released through 4AD, have toured major venues like Barbican, London and Volkbühne, Berlin. Their image making practice including NFT series Infinite Images (2021/22) and Classified (2021) were among the earliest experiments with embeddings in foundational image models. Herndon and Dryhust most recently exhibited at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, presenting xhairymutantx (2024), an interactive text-to-image model.
Since 2021, Herndon and Dryhurst have hosted the Interdependence podcast where they share their ongoing conversations with a network of artists and technologists working with music, AI and crypto. In 2022, the duo co-founded Spawning, an organisation building a consent layer for AI, including tools for artists such as haveibeentrained.com, Kudurru and Source.Plus. This year Herndon and Dryhust were named ‘100 most influential voices in AI’ by TIME Magazine and received the first-ever Digital Human Rights Award from the Austrian Foreign Minister for their work on data empowerment. They have been included in ArtReview’s Power 100 list since 2021.
Founded by artists Ilā Kamalagharan (fka. Anil Sebastian) and Didier Rochard in 2010, London Contemporary Voices is a leading UK choir well-known as one of the most diverse professional choirs in the world. Their singers come from a wide range of musical backgrounds and lived experiences, reflecting the diversity of London. They work on a broad range of artistic projects, events and campaigns across genres.
