Arca will use AI to soundtrack NYC’s Museum of Modern Art
If you pay a visit to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in the near future, you’ll be awash in artificial intelligence before you’ve even seen an exhibit. Electronic musician Arca (who has produced for Bjork and FKA Twigs) has announced that a piece she wrote using Bronze’s AI creative tool will provide the soundtrack for MoMA’s lobby for the next two years once it reopens on October 21st. Don’t think that it’ll be just the same tune playing on loop, though. The AI will “never make the music play the same way twice,” Arca said. In that sense, it’s more like one very large piece.
Bronze is built for precisely for these “non-static, generative and augmented” compositions, using machine learning to expand on the artist’s core ideas. It’s also a music format that will let artists release these AI tunes to the public.
Arca isn’t the first well-known artist to make use of AI for a big project in 2019. Holly Herndon, for instance, created her album Proto by teaching an AI (Spawn) to collaborate. Meanwhile, companies like Sony are experimenting with AI to produce drum tracks. The technology is quickly becoming part of the musical repertoire for artists who want to push boundaries, whether it’s to avoid repetition or fill gaps.
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