Holly Herndon

Holly Herndon is an American composer, musician, and sound artist whose work explores the intersection of electronic music, artificial intelligence, and digital ethics. Herndon received her MFA in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California, and her doctorate in composition from Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. While at Mills, she composed the vocal-generated piece "195," which earned her the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for best composer. Herndon's music frequently incorporates human singing voices, including her own, and is primarily computer-based, utilizing the visual programming language Max/MSP to create custom instruments and vocal processes.

Herndon's discography reflects a progression in experimental electronic music. Her debut album, "Movement," was released through RVNG Intl. On "Platform," she combined the intimacy of her voice and samples from everyday web browsing into songs that examine online privacy, voyeurism, and identity. Her third full-length album, "Proto," was a collaborative project involving a singing AI named Spawn—an artificial neural network trained to recognize and replicate human voices—developed with programmer Jules LaPlace and using Herndon's own singing voice. Spawn's voice was trained through call-and-response singing sessions with hundreds of vocalists, drawing on Herndon's choral background.

Beyond her studio work, Herndon is active in discussions on AI, artist rights, and digital identity. She developed Holly+, a protocol addressing concerns related to deepfakes and distributed identity play. Holly+ is a machine-learning instrument that converts audio files into Herndon's voice and has been presented at TED. Herndon and collaborator Mat Dryhurst received the Ars Electronica STARTS Prize for digital art for Holly+. Together, they launched Spawning, introducing the term "spawning" to describe generating media from a training set using machine learning and enabling artists to opt in or out of datasets used by AI art generators.

Herndon's work has received recognition in both music and visual art. Commissioned for the Whitney Biennial, her project xhairymutantx, created with Dryhurst, focuses on the training data behind AI models. Herndon and Dryhurst also debuted their solo show "The Call" at Serpentine in London, a project built around AI models trained on new recordings from the Sacred Harp collection of hymns, recorded with professional and community choirs from across the UK. They have been awarded Austria's Digital Human Rights Award and the Kairos Prize. Herndon holds a doctorate in computer music from Stanford University and is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Programme. Through her music, installations, advocacy, and public speaking, Herndon is recognized as a leading thinker on creativity and humanity in the era of artificial intelligence.