The Robots of Your Dystopian Future Are Already Here: Two Chilling Videos Drive It All Home

in Technology | November 28th, 2017

A year ago, Boston Dynam­ics released a video show­ing its humanoid robot “Atlas” doing, well, rather human things–opening doors, walk­ing through a snowy for­est, hoist­ing card­board box­es, and lift­ing itself off of the ground. Rarely has some­thing so banal seemed so pecu­liar.

What is “Atlas” doing these days? As shown in this new­ly-released video above, it’s jump­ing to new heights, twist­ing in the air, and doing back­flips with uncan­ny ease. Stand­ing six feet tall and weigh­ing 180 pounds, Atlas was designed to take care of mun­dane prob­lems–like assist­ing  emer­gency ser­vices in search and res­cue oper­a­tions and “oper­at­ing pow­ered equip­ment in envi­ron­ments where humans could not sur­vive.” But that’s not where the appli­ca­tions of Atlas end. See­ing that the Pen­ta­gon has helped finance and design Atlas, you can eas­i­ly see the humanoid fight­ing on the bat­tle­field. Stay tuned for that clip in 2018.

Which brings us to our next video. The new short film, “Slaugh­ter­bots,” comes from the Cam­paign to Stop Killer Robots and it fol­lows this plot:

A mil­i­tary firm unveils a tiny drone that hunts and kills with ruth­less effi­cien­cy. But when the tech­nol­o­gy falls into the wrong hands, no one is safe. Politi­cians are cut down in broad day­light. The machines descend on a lec­ture hall and spot activists, who are swift­ly dis­patched with an explo­sive to the head.

Accord­ing to UC Berke­ley AI expert Stu­art Rus­sell, “Slaugh­ter­bots” looks like sci­ence fic­tion. But it’s not. “It shows the results of inte­grat­ing and minia­tur­iz­ing tech­nolo­gies that we already have.” It is “sim­ply an inte­gra­tion of exist­ing capa­bil­i­ties… In fact, it is eas­i­er to achieve than self-dri­ving cars, which require far high­er stan­dards of per­for­mance.” Recent­ly shown at the Unit­ed Nations’ Con­ven­tion on Con­ven­tion­al Weapons, “Slaugh­ter­bots” comes on the heels of an open let­ter signed by 116 robot­ics and AI sci­en­tists (includ­ing Tesla’s Elon Musk), urg­ing the UN to ban the devel­op­ment and use of killer robots. It reads:

Lethal autonomous weapons threat­en to become the third rev­o­lu­tion in war­fare. Once devel­oped, they will per­mit armed con­flict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can com­pre­hend. These can be weapons of ter­ror, weapons that despots and ter­ror­ists use against inno­cent pop­u­la­tions, and weapons hacked to behave in unde­sir­able ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.

If we already have mil­i­tary drones tak­ing out ene­mies across the world (in places like Yemen, Soma­lia, Iraq, Syr­ia, Libya and Afghanistan), the men­tal leap to deploy­ing Slaugh­ter­bots does­n’t seem too great. Do you trust our lead­ers to make fin­er dis­tinc­tions and keep a lid on Pan­do­ra’s Box? Or could you see them tear­ing Pan­do­ra’s Box open like a gift on Christ­mas day? Yeah, me too. The robots of your dystopi­an future are now here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT

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Net Neutrality Explained and Defended in a Doodle-Filled Video by Vi Hart: The Time to Save the Open Web is Now

in Current Affairs, Technology | November 22nd, 2017

By the end of Decem­ber, net neu­tral­i­ty may be a thing of the past. We’ll pay the price. You’ll pay the price. Com­cast, Ver­i­zon and AT&T will make out like ban­dits.

If you need a quick reminder of what net neu­tral­i­ty is, what ben­e­fits it brings and what you stand to lose, watch Vi Hart’s 11-minute explain­er above. It lays things out quite well. Then, once you have a han­dle on things, write or call Con­gress now and make a last stand for the open web.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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The 1991 Tokyo Museum Exhibition That Was Only Accessible by Telephone, Fax & Modem: Features Works by Laurie Anderson, John Cage, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard & Merce Cunningham

in Art, Technology | November 22nd, 2017

The deep­er we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the more ener­gy and resources muse­ums put into dig­i­tiz­ing their offer­ings and mak­ing them avail­able, free and world­wide, as vir­tu­al expe­ri­ences on the inter­net. But what form would a vir­tu­al muse­um have tak­en before the inter­net as we know it today? Japan­ese telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant NTT (best known today in the form of the cell­phone ser­vice provider NTT DoCo­Mo) devel­oped one answer to that ques­tion in 1991: The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work, an elab­o­rate art exhib­it acces­si­ble nowhere in the phys­i­cal world but every­where in Japan by tele­phone, fax, and even — in a high­ly lim­it­ed, pre-World-Wide-Web fash­ion — com­put­er modem.

“The works and mes­sages from almost 100 artists, writ­ers, and cul­tur­al fig­ures were avail­able through five chan­nels,” says Mono­skop, where you can down­load The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work’s cat­a­log (also avail­able in high res­o­lu­tion). “The works in ‘Voice & sound chan­nel’ such as talks and read­ings on the theme of com­mu­ni­ca­tion could be lis­tened to by tele­phone. The ‘Inter­ac­tive chan­nel’ offered par­tic­i­pants to cre­ate musi­cal tunes by push­ing but­tons on a tele­phone. Works of art, nov­els, comics and essays could be received at home through ‘Fax chan­nel.’ The ‘Live chan­nel’ offered artists’ live per­for­mances and tele­phone dia­logues between invit­ed intel­lec­tu­als to be heard by tele­phone. Addi­tion­al­ly, com­put­er graph­ics works could be accessed by modem and down­loaded to one’s per­son­al com­put­er screen for view­ing.”

“We need to rec­og­nize hon­est­ly that there were numer­ous prob­lems with The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work,” writes cura­tor and crit­ic Asa­da Aki­ra in the cat­a­log’s intro­duc­tion. “Nei­ther the prepa­ra­tion time nor the means for car­ry­ing it out was suf­fi­cient. Thus there were not a few cre­ative artists whose par­tic­i­pa­tion would have been a great asset to the project, but whom we were forced to do with­out.” Yet its list of con­trib­u­tors, which still reads like a Who’s-Who of the avant-garde and oth­er­wise adven­tur­ous cre­ators of the day, includes archi­tects like Isoza­ki Ara­ta and Ren­zo Piano, musi­cians like Lau­rie Ander­son and Sakamo­to Ryuichi, direc­tors like Kuro­sawa Kiyoshi and Derek Jar­man, writ­ers like William S. Bur­roughs and J.G. Bal­lard, com­posers like John Cage and Philip Glass, chore­o­g­ra­phers like William Forsythe, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, and visu­al artists like Yokoo Tadanori and Jeff Koons.

The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work launched as the first ven­ture of NTT’s Inter­Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cen­ter (ICC), a “21st-cen­tu­ry muse­um that will pro­vide inter­face between sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy and art and cul­ture in the com­ing elec­tron­ic age,” as Asa­da described it in 1991. Hav­ing recent­ly cel­e­brat­ed its 20th year open in Toky­o’s Opera City Tow­er, the ICC con­tin­ues to put on a vari­ety of non-vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tions very much in the spir­it of the orig­i­nal, and involv­ing some of the very same artists as well (as of this writ­ing, they’re ready­ing a music instal­la­tion co-cre­at­ed by Sakamo­to). But offline or on, any union of art and tech­nol­o­gy is only as inter­est­ing as the spir­it moti­vat­ing it, and the cre­ators of such projects would do well to keep in mind the words of The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work con­trib­u­tor Kon­dou Kou­ji: “I hope that peo­ple will think of this as the expe­ri­ence of acci­den­tal­ly drift­ing into a tele­phone net­work, where­in awaits a vast world of plea­sure and fun.”

via @monoskop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Japan­ese Com­put­er Artist Makes “Dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans” in 1964: When Giant Main­frame Com­put­ers Were First Used to Cre­ate Art

Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell: Nam June Paik’s Avant-Garde New Year’s Cel­e­bra­tion with Lau­rie Ander­son, John Cage, Peter Gabriel & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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New “Women of NASA” Lego Immortalizes the STEM Contributions of Sally Ride, Margaret Hamilton, Mae Jemison & Nancy Grace Roman

in Gender, Science, Technology | November 20th, 2017

Ear­li­er this year, the Lego com­pa­ny announced that it would pro­duce a Women of NASA Lego set, based on a pro­pos­al it received from sci­ence writer Maia Wein­stock. In that pro­pos­al, Wein­stock wrote: “Women have played crit­i­cal roles through­out the his­to­ry of the U.S. space pro­gram, a.k.a. NASA or the Nation­al Aero­nau­tics and Space Admin­is­tra­tion. Yet in many cas­es, their con­tri­bu­tions are unknown or under-appre­ci­at­ed — espe­cial­ly as women have his­tor­i­cal­ly strug­gled to gain accep­tance in the fields of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math­e­mat­ics (STEM).”

Now on the mar­ket, the new Lego set immor­tal­izes the con­tri­bu­tions of NASA astro­nauts Sal­ly Ride and Mae Jemi­son; astronomer Nan­cy Grace Roman; and com­put­er sci­en­tist Mar­garet Hamil­ton, who we fea­tured here this past sum­mer. The video above gives you a com­plete walk-through, show­ing you, for exam­ple, Hamil­ton stand­ing next to the large pile of source code that pow­ered the Apol­lo mis­sion (just as she did in this his­toric pho­to). Or you’ll see Nan­cy Grace Roman accom­pa­nied by a pos­able Hub­ble Space Tele­scope and a pro­ject­ed image of a plan­e­tary neb­u­la. The video clos­es with some com­men­tary on the social mer­its of this new Lego set, which you may or may not agree with.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty to Cre­ate a Lego Pro­fes­sor­ship

The LEGO Tur­ing Machine Gives a Quick Primer on How Your Com­put­er Works

Two Scenes from Stan­ley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Recre­at­ed in Lego

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Hear 1,500+ Genres of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insanely Thorough Interactive Graph

in Music, Technology | October 13th, 2017

If you are ready for a time-suck inter­net expe­ri­ence that will also make you feel slight­ly old and out of step with the cul­ture, feel free to dive into Every Noise at Once. A scat­ter-plot of over 1,530 musi­cal gen­res sourced from Spotify’s lists and based on 35 mil­lion songs,  Every Noise at Once is a bold attempt at musi­cal tax­on­o­my. The Every Noise at Once web­site was cre­at­ed by Glenn McDon­ald, and is an off­shoot of his work at Echo Nest (acquired by Spo­ti­fy in 2014).

McDon­ald explains his graph thus:

This is an ongo­ing attempt at an algo­rith­mi­cal­ly-gen­er­at­ed, read­abil­i­ty-adjust­ed scat­ter-plot of the musi­cal genre-space, based on data tracked and ana­lyzed for 1,536 gen­res by Spo­ti­fy. The cal­i­bra­tion is fuzzy, but in gen­er­al down is more organ­ic, up is more mechan­i­cal and elec­tric; left is denser and more atmos­pher­ic, right is spiki­er and bounci­er.

It’s also egal­i­tar­i­an, with world dom­i­nat­ing “rock-and-roll” giv­en the same space and size as its neigh­bors choro (instru­men­tal Brazil­ian pop­u­lar music), cow­boy-west­ern (Con­way Twit­ty, Mer­le Hag­gard, et. al.), and Indi­an folk (Asha Bhosle, for exam­ple). It also makes for some strange bed­fel­lows: what fac­tor does musique con­crete share with “Chris­t­ian relax­i­tive” oth­er than “rea­sons my col­lege room­mate and I nev­er got along.” Now you can find out!

Click on any of the gen­res and you’ll hear a sam­ple of that music. Dou­ble click and you’ll be tak­en to a sim­i­lar scat­ter-plot graph of its most pop­u­lar artists, this time with font size denot­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and a sim­i­lar sam­ple of their music.

I’ve been spend­ing most of my time explor­ing up in the top right cor­ner where all sorts of elec­tron­ic dance sub­gen­res hang out. I’m not too sure what dif­fer­en­ti­ates “deep tech house” from “deep deep house” or “deep min­i­mal tech­no” or “tech house” or even “deep melod­ic euro house” but I now know where to come for a refresh­er course.

Spo­ti­fy and oth­er ser­vices depend on algo­rithms and tax­onomies like this to deliv­er con­sis­tent lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences to its users, and they were attract­ed to Echo Nest for its work with gen­res. Echo Nest was orig­i­nal­ly based on the dis­ser­ta­tion work of Tris­tan Jehan and Bri­an Whit­man at the MIT Media Lab, who over a decade ago were try­ing to under­stand the “fin­ger­prints” of record­ed music. Now when you lis­ten to Spotify’s per­son­al­ized playlists, Echo Nest’s research is the engine work­ing in the back­ground.

McDon­ald says in this 2014 Dai­ly Dot arti­cle this isn’t about a machine guess­ing our taste.

“No, the machines don’t know us bet­ter than we do. But they can very eas­i­ly know more than we do. My job is not to tell you what to lis­ten to, or to pass judg­ment on things or ‘make taste.’ It’s to help you explore and dis­cov­er. Your taste is your busi­ness. Under­stand­ing your taste and sit­u­at­ing it in some intel­li­gi­ble con­text is my busi­ness.”

If you’d like a more pas­sive jour­ney through the ever expand­ing music genre uni­verse, there’s a Spo­ti­fy playlist of one song from each genre (all 1,500+) above. See you in the deep, deep house!

via Kottke.org

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Elling­ton Cre­at­ed Sound­tracks for Noir Films & TV

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Watch Brian Eno’s Experimental Film “The Ship,” Made with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, Music, Technology | September 27th, 2017

“How is Bri­an Eno still find­ing unchart­ed waters after half a cen­tu­ry spent mak­ing music?” asked The Verge’s Jamieson Cox after the release of Eno’s 25th album, The Ship. Call­ing it a “dark near-mas­ter­piece,” The Onion’s A.V. Club expressed sim­i­lar aston­ish­ment. The album “can hold its own among the very best in a career full of bril­liant work…. Forty-one years after Anoth­er Green World, Eno is still for­ag­ing for new musi­cal ground, and what he’s able to come up with is noth­ing short of mirac­u­lous. When lis­ten­ing to The Ship, we get the sense that he will nev­er stop.”

Should you think that an exag­ger­a­tion, note that since The Ship, Eno has already released yet anoth­er crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed ambi­ent album, Reflec­tion—like its pre­de­ces­sor, a somber sound­track for somber times. And like anoth­er end­less­ly pro­duc­tive mul­ti­me­dia artist of his gen­er­a­tion, Lau­rie Ander­son, Eno hasn’t only con­tin­ued to make work that feels deeply con­nect­ed to the moment, but he has adapt­ed to wave after wave of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, this time around, har­ness­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to cre­ate a “gen­er­a­tive film” drawn from The Ship’s title track (below).

You can see a trail­er for the film at the top of the post, but this hard­ly does the expe­ri­ence jus­tice, since each viewer’s—or user’s—expe­ri­ence of it will be dif­fer­ent. As Pitch­fork describes the project: “On a web­site, ‘The Ship’ plays, and the user can click on tweets of news sto­ries, which appear along­side his­tor­i­cal pho­tos.” The film uti­lizes “a bespoke arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence pro­gramme,” the site explains, “devel­oped by the Dentsu Lab Tokyo,” explor­ing “var­i­ous his­tor­i­cal pho­to­graph­ic images and real-time news feeds to com­pose a col­lec­tive pho­to­graph­ic mem­o­ry of humankind.” (Dentsu received a pres­ti­gious prize nom­i­na­tion from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion for their work.)

It’s a con­cep­tu­al­ly grandiose project—which makes sense giv­en its source mate­r­i­al. The Ship, the musi­cal project, takes its inspi­ra­tion from the Titan­ic, “the ship that could nev­er sink,” Eno told The New York Times, “and… the First World War was the war that we couldn’t pos­si­bly lose—this men­tal­i­ty suf­fused pow­er­ful men. They get this idea that, ‘We’re unstop­pable, so there­fore, we’ll go ahead and do it….’ And they can’t.” Eno con­tin­ues in this vein of trag­ic explo­ration with the film, remark­ing in a state­ment:

Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and para­noia: the hubris of our ever-grow­ing pow­er con­trasts with the para­noia that we’re per­ma­nent­ly and increas­ing­ly under threat. At the zenith we realise we have to come down again… we know that we have more than we deserve or can defend, so we become ner­vous. Some­body, some­thing is going to take it all from us: that is the dread of the wealthy. Para­noia leads to defen­sive­ness, and we all end up in the trench­es fac­ing each oth­er across the mud.

The inter­ac­tive visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion takes these themes even fur­ther, ask­ing how much we as spec­ta­tors of hubris and para­noia are com­plic­it in per­pet­u­at­ing them, or per­haps chang­ing and shap­ing their direc­tion through tech­nol­o­gy: “Does the machine intel­li­gence pro­duce a point of view inde­pen­dent of its mak­ers or its view­ers? Or are we—human and machine—ultimately co-cre­at­ing new and unex­pect­ed mean­ings?”

You be the judge. See your own per­son­al­ized ver­sion of Eno’s The Ship film here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno on Why Do We Make Art & What’s It Good For?: Down­load His 2015 John Peel Lec­ture

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Lau­rie Ander­son Intro­duces Her Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Lets You Fly Mag­i­cal­ly Through Sto­ries

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renaissance Invention Created to Make Books Portable & Help Scholars Study Several Books at Once (1588)

in Books, History, Technology | September 25th, 2017

Devo­tees of print may object, but we read­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry enjoy a great priv­i­lege in our abil­i­ty to store a prac­ti­cal­ly infi­nite num­ber of dig­i­tized books on our com­put­ers. What’s more, those com­put­ers have them­selves shrunk down to such com­pact­ness that we can car­ry them around day and night with­out dis­com­fort. This would hard­ly have worked just forty years ago, when books came only in print and a seri­ous com­put­er could still fill a room. The paper book may remain rea­son­ably com­pet­i­tive even today with the con­ve­nience refined over hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years, but its first hand­made gen­er­a­tions tend­ed toward lav­ish, weighty dec­o­ra­tion and for­mats that now look com­i­cal­ly over­sized.

These posed real prob­lems of unwield­i­ness, one solu­tion to which took the unlike­ly form of the book­wheel. In 1588’s The Var­i­ous and Inge­nious Machines of Cap­tain Agosti­no Ramel­li, the Ital­ian engi­neer of that name “out­lined his vision for a wheel-o-books that would employ the log­ic of oth­er types of wheel (water, Fer­ris, ‘Price is Right’, etc.) to rotate books clock­work-style before a sta­tion­ary user,” writes the Atlantic’s Megan Gar­ber.

The design used “epicyclic gear­ing — a sys­tem that had at that point been used only in astro­nom­i­cal clocks — to ensure that the shelves bear­ing the wheel’s books (more than a dozen of them) would remain at the same angle no mat­ter the wheel’s posi­tion. The seat­ed read­er could then employ either hand or foot con­trols to move the desired book pret­ty much into her (or, much more like­ly, his) lap.” This rotat­ing book­case gave 16th cen­tu­ry read­ers the abil­i­ty to read heavy books in place, with far greater ease.

In his 1588  book, Ramel­li added:

This is a beau­ti­ful and inge­nious machine, very use­ful and con­ve­nient for any­one who takes plea­sure in study, espe­cial­ly those who are indis­posed and tor­ment­ed by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large num­ber of books with­out mov­ing from one spot. Moveover, it has anoth­er fine con­ve­nience in that it occu­pies very lit­tle space in the place where it is set, as any­one of intel­li­gence can clear­ly see from the draw­ing.

Inven­tors all over Europe cre­at­ed their own ver­sions of the book­wheel dur­ing the 17th and 18th cen­turies, four­teen exam­ples of which still exist. (The one pic­tured in the mid­dle of the post, built around 1650, now resides in Lei­den.) Even archi­tect Daniel Libe­skind has built one, based on Ramel­li’s design and exhib­it­ed in his home­land at the 1986 Venice Bien­nale. Alas, after it went to Gene­va for an exhi­bi­tion at the Palais Wil­son, it fell vic­tim to a ter­ror­ist fire bomb­ing. Inno­va­tion, it seems, will always have its ene­mies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Musician Taryn Southern Is Composing Her New Album with Artificial Intelligence: Hear the First Track

in Music, Technology | September 21st, 2017

“Break Free” is a new song by Taryn and Amper. The for­mer, Taryn South­ern, is a musi­cian and singer pop­u­lar on Youtube. The lat­ter, how­ev­er, is not human at all. Instead, Amper is an arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent music com­pos­er, pro­duc­er and per­former, devel­oped by a com­bi­na­tion of “music and tech­nol­o­gy experts” and now put to the test, being the engine behind Taryn’s sin­gle and even­tu­al­ly a full album, ten­ta­tive­ly called I AM AI.

To under­stand what is Taryn and what is Amper in this project, the singer talks about it in this Verge inter­view:

The way it works is to give the plat­form cer­tain input like BPM, instru­men­ta­tion that I like, genre, key, etc. The plat­form will spit a song out at me, and then I can iter­ate from there, mak­ing adjust­ments to the instru­ments and the key. I can even change the genre or emo­tion­al feel or the song, until I get some­thing that I’m rel­a­tive­ly hap­py with. Once I have that, I down­load all the stems of the instru­men­ta­tion to build actu­al song struc­ture.

What Amper’s real­ly good at is com­pos­ing and pro­duc­ing instru­men­ta­tion, but it doesn’t yet under­stand song struc­ture. It might give you a verse or the cho­rus and it’s up to me to stitch these pieces togeth­er so that it sounds like some­thing famil­iar you would hear on the radio. Once I’m hap­py with the song, then I write the vocal melody and lyrics.

The key sen­tence for cyn­ics is the sec­ond to last one. Amper deliv­ers the famil­iar, or rather, Taryn makes Amper work until she gets some­thing famil­iar. AI is not at the stage yet where it might sur­prise us with a deci­sion, except in the cas­es where it goes spec­tac­u­lar­ly wrong. Right now it’s very good at learn­ing pat­terns, at imi­tat­ing, at deliv­er­ing a vari­a­tion on a theme. (That’s why it’s real­ly good at imi­ta­tion Bach, for exam­ple.)

We could imag­ine, how­ev­er, a future where AI would be able to take a num­ber of musi­cal ele­ments, styles, and gen­res and come out with a hybrid that we’ve nev­er heard before. And would that be any bet­ter than hav­ing a human do so?

By the way, you can try out Amper your­self here. Your mileage may vary.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Cre­at­ed by Syn­the­siz­ers Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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