It was this alarm in the background going to be okay, does that mean we should get out?
Sound installation happening?
Do you think that's a building wide noise?
No, no, one not like there's people chilling over there and they don't look concerned.
I don't smell smoke.
The Barbercane Center, it turns out, was not on fire, but Holly Herndon and I still got out of there. We went back to her hotel to record this episode of Midnight Chat in a very unlikely place. We sat on a little landing just by the lifts on floor three of her hotel, which meant that anyone coming up to floor three, the lift would open and they would be faced with myself and Holly sat on a small
bench talking into her microphones. Quite a bizarre welcome to some people who had maybe just arrived in London for that holiday. But thank you to Holly for putting up with this kind of slap dash, unprofessional outfit that we're running here alloud them quiet. I met Holly earlier this year. We did a big cover feature with her about her new album called Proto, and there's a lot for me to tell you about that before we get started on
this week's episode. Proto is Holly's third record. Holly is a experimental electronic musician who makes a lot of music using computers, but protos are particularly interesting and quite revolutionary record. It was made using AI, and we talk a bit about a baby, an AI baby that she's made. It's called Spawn. I've met Spawn in Berlin and spawns her AI baby. So the way Proto as a record, which is an experimental electronic records that's still got a lot
of melody in it, I'd recommend checking it out. But the way it was made was by feeding an AI machine that she had made with her partner, her husband, Matt Dryhurst. They made this AI and they sang to this machine, and this machine kind of started to learn certain things and gave them some material to make this new record, Proto. What's interesting about this, I think is that you hear a story about musician makes AI album and the first thing you're probably thinking is I don't
want that. That's not what music is. Music's not about getting it automated. But as we talk about in this podcast, it's not as simple as that. In fact, what Holly was exploring was how we can use technology to have greater human connections and interactions with other people. Technology doesn't have to be something that replaces humans. It can be something that frees us and lets us be more human. So protos are really interesting as some really interesting concepts
behind that. Holly is a lovely person to talk to, as you're about to hear, she is extremely intelligent. Just passed her PhD at Stamford University. She was born in Tennessee, a in the Bible Belts. It currently lives in Berlin and spent some time over on the West Coast in Silicon Valley while she was studying. Check out Proto. It's Holly's third record. It is out now on four A D. And also check out the first record that we the first tape that I talked to her about. She's called Car.
You can find out on YouTube and I have linked to that in the bottom of this podcast. But for now here is myself and Holly Herndon sat in a hallway on floor three of a hotel near the Barbercane Center as people kind of come and go, They stroll past us every now and then, and we just try to do our best to make this episode of Midnight Chats as normal as possible. I feel like we did
a good job and don't forget that. If you do like this episode of Midnight Chats, you can support this podcast by visiting loudon quiet dot com forward slash subscribe and they'll see that. We also make a monthly music magazine and for just three pounds a month, we will
send you our next nine issues. And while you're there on the site, why not do a little search for Holly Herndon and there you'll be able to read the cover feature that we reference in this podcast, which does a more in depth job of exploring Holly's career, her music, and particularly her new album Proto When that Lift open.
Hello, madam.
So I'm going to think they're in some immersive theater experience. Well, we're just sat here. What a cool hotel. So we've decayed, We've we've moved from the barbercane. The alarm was too much.
Yes, and just as we were leaving it stopped.
It stopped. But that's okay, Yeah, that's the way it goes. So I want to ask you. You went on to it with Radiohead and they had the big glories.
Right of of course?
Yeah, And I because say you know, they go to these kind of like giant I mean, this wasn't like a stadium tour for them.
I think it was a more intimate show tour for them, which for me was like, oh my god, these are the biggest rooms I've ever played.
But yeah, they have like a whole crew, you know, who like build up the stage and it's really impressive actually to like build up this whole world and then tear it down every night and then it drives off to the next city. So, you know, we don't have anything as complicated as that, So we try to have things that are like pretty uniform that you can ask at each kind of location, like you know, tables and platforms and screens and things like that.
Do you have Spawn with you?
We don't have Spawn with us. She doesn't travel, not yet.
Actually, just before we left, Jewels are collaborator who just got married Jewels. Yes, so Jewels just picked up Spawn and is gonna be working with her pretty intensively for the next couple of weeks because we really want to try to start with her live.
But it's like there's this latency issue.
Sure, and I imagine transporting an AI baby.
Well yeah, right now, we have.
She's like her body is in this kind of like tower. It's like, you know, desktop tower. But we don't really need all of that space really, we just need enough room for like a fan and for the GPU. So we're looking into smaller, little baby towers.
Sure, it occurred to me yesterday that we're obviously at the end of a decade pretty much.
Oh no, are you wanting me to say something profound?
No, it wasn't that. It's not that. But then I was thinking that you're because you released your first I mean, this decade is where your career started, Like in twenty eleven was when you put up your first tape, tape car Okay, so this is your career decade. I guess Oh god, I think is that?
And I'm retiring?
But I was going to say, like, what do you remember of that of releasing that tape, because it's like it was a one track, forty five minute track, wasn't it on a cassette called professional All Podcasts?
He handled well, didn't he was?
He was relaxed. That's our first lift.
Guess what what was the question?
What do you remember of that time of like putting that tape out?
And that was in such a different like mindset at that point. I mean I never imagined to have the size audience that I have, Like to be playing the Barbican tomorrow to like two thousand people's kind of blowing my mind.
It's a really exciting. But I just never expected that. Back then.
I was just like, you know, playing a little noise show. And this cassette was made specifically for a noise label that called Third Sex, based in Chicago. And so I was asked to make a noise cassette for this label because he saw the guy who ran the label who passed away actually a couple of years ago. He saw me play at like a noise venue and was like, oh, I'd love for you to make a tape. And so I was like, ah, a cassette, Like who listens to cassettes?
Where do people listen to cassettes? I mean I had back then, I had a cassette player on my toilet with like a selection of cassettes if you needed to spend a.
Little extra time on the toilet.
But so I asked him to ask his audience, like where do they listen to their cassettes? And he actually like sent out a survey which is kind of wild that people would respond, and they did. I mean, I don't think it was like a huge number of people, but most of the people that responded said they listened in their car, which I thought was wild because you know, like these must be some old cars. Yeah, yeah, so you know, in the States, I think it was like
a largely American audience. People are driving still driving like vast distances, especially if you're not living in a city, like if you're in the suburbs, you're definitely still commuting a lot. So I was like, Okay, I'm gonna make something specifically for the car. And I had a car at the time because I was commuting between Palo Alto and San Francisco like an hour every day back and forth.
God, I sound like really out of bread. Why it's like my last gasps.
So yeah, I made it specifically for the Toyota Matrix that I was driving at the time.
So I would like work on stuff.
On my computer and then go down to my car and play it in my car and see how it was resonating the car, and then like tweak the frequency range to like works with it. So it's not gonna work perfectly in everyone's car. But it was like made specifically for this car. And then I did things with like the windows. I like recorded the window, I you know, did a lot of like field recording of the car. I made like a fake PSA radio announce. It was just fun.
I don't know.
I was just like messing around, and I didn't imagine that that many people would ever hear it.
It was just well, you can listen to this on it's on YouTube.
Now it's on YouTube.
Yeah, oh wow, someone's put it up there. I listened to it.
Yes, it's not that's not where it's intended to take it down or no, Britain, bring YouTube to your car.
Funny enough, like even though you say, like back then, obviously you had no like a cassette tape of experimental sound made for a car. You never expected to be sat in this lobby with people walking past us. But I'm going to play the barbercan tomorrow to two thousand people having made a record with the use of machine learning.
But oddly, when you hear that first tape, it kind of it makes sense that you would end up here, Like the sound of it, like the fact that all of those things that you said of making field recordings and the thought that went into that that cassette, it makes sense that you would end up at this point with Proto.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
I've never really had like a super conventional way of recording songs like it's you know, I'm I still like to kind of and I still have a lot of learning to do about kind of like perfecting the mix and all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, I think I.
Have a very idiosyncratic approach to recording into kind of like collaging things together.
Yeah. So Proto was released in May, Okay. Well, because of everything that goes into that record and the themes of it and the way you've made it and all of the stuff about AI and things, and you've obviously been talking to people since then about it. Have people been getting anything consistently wrong about it? Because there's a lot to unpack when you don't, you know, as when if you're a journalist who doesn't know anything about as I was when I met you, I didn't know anything
about what AI is is. Have people understood it? If people got the point of it, I think.
It's generally people who don't spend time with it and assume that because it's dealing with a certain kind of technology, that it's kind of like an endorsement or a kind of like Silicon Valley shilling. And that's usually people who really haven't looked into what we're doing, or it's like a misunderstanding, or they just are like really turned off by the concept of like working with technology in this kind of way.
Like I ran into a musician I'm not going.
To name her here, but like this really amazing musician and we were chatting. I ran into her in a museum the other the other day, and I was telling we were talking about the album.
She was like, Yeah, when I.
Heard AI and Music, I was like, ah, I don't, like I want nothing to do with that, Like that
doesn't sound like anything that I'm into. But then after hearing you talk about why you did it in your approach, now I understand that it's something else, and then it's something that I would be interested in, you know, so I think, ah, yeah, something about like you know, the like endless feed, Like people sometime just see like a little one liner in their like feed and then they're like we often get like reduced to tags or keywords like Holly herndon tech AI music, and then it's like
next and like the next.
Person, you're just like, oh my god, there's like so much more than that. But I mean I get.
It, like everyone has like a finite amount of attention and like amount of screen time, and so I think sometimes that's what's kind of like misunderstood about it.
Have you managed to boil it down or even wanted to do this to like reduce it to some like a sound bite when someone asks you, not necessarily somebody who's then going to write an article about it, but just if you know, a friend of a friend asks, oh, what's your album about? Is there a way to even say what proto is in a in a short concise way that people can understand?
Oh god, I probably should think about like the what's it called the elevator?
Bitch?
Yeah, yeah, No, I don't think I have such a
concise way of putting it. I mean I think, you know, when people bring up the AI thing, I say, well, I wanted to work with AI directly, like hands on, so that I could formulate my own opinion and my own kind of like specific kind of like stance on the technology without kind of relying on second or third hand articles kind of because I feel like that's what we're fed a lot, are these kind of like hype articles about what the technology is doing or what it
could do, and so I wanted to actually understand what its capabilities and limitations were so that I could then formulate my opinion about it. Sure, so that is what I would say about the AI part, but about the overall album, I mean, it's hard because it was like
a three year process and it's multifaceted. But you know what, I think maybe I could say, you know, when you're looking at artificial intelligence, it makes you kind of go back to the beginning and think about the history of human intelligence and the role that music played in that.
And that's why I went back to look at vocal traditions around the world and the way that you know, community and cultures have have developed this vocal technology as a survival mechanism and how that's how that's contributed to our shared human intelligence.
That record and coming to meet you to do that feature we did has genuinely made me think differently about AI and readdress my thoughts on it, because I think that the kind of light bulb moment was when you were talking about how you've used AI to try and actually have more human interaction, because I think that's the misunderstanding of proto for people when before it came out, maybe or they read anything about it was musician makes AI record, and they just think the whole thing's automated.
You've not already done anything.
Right, musicians humans with AI, And that's actually the opposite.
It's exactly the opposite, because you were feeding, you were using big groups of people to feed your AI baby spawn, right, and that connection is something you wouldn't have had before because you were a solo electronic musician. He was making everything on there, you wouldn't have had that kind of
that group thing. And also the point you made, which was technology just generally in our world should free us up to be more human and give us more time to exactly be normal people and be people and have connections with people, which is something I hadn't really thought about before.
If we have agency over it, but oftentimes it's designed in a way that it kind of reduces our agency, and that's something that I'm constantly pushing back against trying to understand how it functions. At like a very big infrastructural or like protocol layer. So you know, you can like really embed the the kind of like if you want to say, ethics or the ideology of a culture into the protocol.
Layer of a technology.
I mean you can see the value system in the very protocol layer. And so that's yeah, that's something that I find really fascinating. I want to feel like I have a sense of agency. I mean, of course, like human will, like free will and all these kinds of things. That's like a whole other kettle of worms that I really don't want.
To get into.
But that was another like rabbit hole when thinking about AI. It's like, you know, how much free will do we actually have?
But yeah, when.
Dealing with technology and dealing with these like highly mediated systems, like where does the human fit in? And if if especially you know, we can use the kind of the performance stage as a metaphor for like a wider.
Kind of like life experience.
But you know, if so much of our kind of performance is being augmented or taken care of by these kind of automated systems, what is that free us up to do?
On stage?
In my mind, it doesn't free us up to just stand there and let the lights and everything do all the work for us, and we get bored and we just stand there. It frees us up to do something else. And for me, I was really missing this idea of musicking with people in real time, like singing with people, performing with people, improvising with people. And if the computer can be this kind of like brain that's organizing these things around us so we don't have to worry about X,
y Z, then we can really focus on each other. Yeah, that was kind of the point.
Has it met as the whole experience made to you? It must have changed your thoughts on technology, your relationship with technology or I mean.
That's been like an ongoing thing for the last, as you've put it, decades.
Thanks for the reminder. No, but yeah, yeah it's been. I mean I.
Wasn't really dealing with technology that directly or that intimately until I moved to California. I really think that we're somehow like a product of our environments.
You know. I was in Berlin and I.
Was surrounded by a certain kind of like milieu of like thought, and then I moved to the Bay Area and I was exposed to like a whole different approach to technology, and I think the kind of like the reputation that the Bay Area gets is from like the Googles and the facebooks and the Apple. But that the Apple, the Apple. But I mean that's like one part of that area. It's like the Bay Area is such a complicated.
Culture.
It's such an amazing part of the world. I mean, it's it's a very like technologically.
Forward place and there's not one single ideology. There's a ton of like diy tech weirdos there.
That's where I kind of drew my inspiration people that were teaching me how to how to program for the first time and how to have some sort of agency over my own practice.
I mean, that's the thing.
With a lot of electronic music is you kind of like load up whatever software has.
Been designed by an engineer.
And already in that software, so many decisions have been made, Like you open up the template, the BPM, the the meter, all these things are kind of decided. You throw in like the instruments that are easiest to throw in and the tune. You know, everything has just been in a lot of ways kind of like predetermined, and you can hear that like I can go out and you know, I love Ableton, but I can go out and be like, oh, this is such an Ableton song, do you know what
I mean? It just has that Ableton sounds. And that's for me not having agency over the tool. Ableton's an amazing tool. Don't let it write for you, like use it to write, to write your own thing and have your own kind of idea that you're bringing to it. So that's why it was important to me to learn how to program with Max and to and not even just that, just like figuring out idiosyncratic production methods that were really specific to whatever topic I was dealing with.
So like if I was dealing with surveillance self surveillance, I was using maths net concrete software that he made, you know, record myself and spying all myself things like that. So it's like, you know, I'm not I'm not that heavily. Sometimes I rely on lyrics, but I'm not just relying on lyrics to express an idea. I want the kind of process of the making of the thing to be about the thing so that you can hear it kind
of tech texturally and tamborly in the material itself. And that's maybe the thread that you're hearing from car to proto is this kind of yeah, and what what ends up happening is you have like a lo fi and a high fi contrast and try and trying to make those those worlds live together.
I mean, I.
Also like, was really lucky to get to work with Marta Salogni. She's a mixing engineer based here in London and she's amazing.
Oh my god. Mixing drums with her was just like.
Whoa, yeah that was her proto and like, oh my god, that was really fun.
Just like all of a sudden, it's like a stadium drum kit. That's like I was like, oh my god.
Yeah, So we're getting to collaborate with people like that also kind of like you know, bring things to life, and I call it.
It's interesting to hear that you that you say about the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley kind of the DIY element of that, because the presumption is that when you think of those tech starts that become Instagram or Facebook or whatever, that DIY is the last thing they are. They are capitalist machines, and they are and they kind of I mean they are, But is so is there is there in the Bay areas that in this tech world.
Is everyone gunning for that? Though, Like even like the DIY people that are doing interesting things, and they are they all aiming or am I oversimplifying that?
I think you're oversimplifying it.
It's it's a part of the world that's extremely technologically like highly educated, like over educated kind of like part of the world. It's like and there you have so many various viewpoints. I mean, it's I think the people that get the most attention are of course the Apple
and the Facebook because they have the most power. But you have all kinds of divergent ideologies and approaches, you know, you have like, uh, there's a little uh, there's a little startup called Keith McMillan Instruments where some of my friends from Mills and Stanford have have worked where they are just kind of like developing new MIDI controllers and like weird instruments, and there's they are not trying to
be the next Instagram. They're just like, you know, people who want to develop electronic music instruments to like the next the next phase, and they're they're just like beautiful nerds. There's like that there, and then there's a lot of just like really genuinely curious, nerdy people there who are just like really enjoy the research.
I mean Karma where I was based at Stanford.
The origins of that of that institution or John Chowning is a composer and he was messing around with oscillators in the lab and he discovered that if he modulated the frequency of one sign tone, it would change the tambre and the frequency of another sign tone. And that's where we got FM synthesis, and that went into cell phone technology, and that went into the you know, Yamaha synthesizers.
And I mean, you don't want to kind of like over romanticize this kind of like garage narrative, but there are there are people just kind of like tinkering and doing things like that for the love of it.
With what you've got and you've got this AI baby, Now, Spawn, what do you? Is there a plan of what you do next? Like? Has have you been continually Because the way I understand it was Spawn was constantly learning things like constantly being fed kind of data and interpreting that. Has that been continuing since the record came out? Is there?
Well? We took a little break to work on the live show and then you know, Jules was wedding planning. Yeah, but no, we've been working I would say, like on and off since the record came out. We've been trying to get this real real time system working. And it used to have like a thirty second latency if it's even a latency at that that amount of time, and now it's down to like a second or something, I don't know, it's pretty short or maybe even like half a second.
So we're trying to get it to be like, you know, so.
How would that work? That would work? You would speak, you would feed something in, and you could.
Perform through this kind of like model.
And at the moment there's about half a second to a second delay. Yeah, exactly, actually happening. Yeah, that's quick though to get that down from thirty seconds.
Yeah, it's getting better, but the problem is it sounds kind of like shit.
That's the thing.
You have to be really patient, like it sounds like, you know, it's like very like raspy and everything, but like it you I know that it'll get better because we've been there before and we yeah, so we I don't want to just do like some sort of like parlor trick on stage and be like, you know, like sing something and then thirty seconds later this like comes out and it's like see we do real time. I'm like, no, I want it to be something interesting. So that's why we've been trying to develop it.
But yeah, it's something that we'll keep doing.
It's just one of those things where you know, like we've had a lot of people be like, oh, can we like what about March twenty twenty we can have And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know when it's gonna when the like aha moment is gonna come and it's gonna be like, oh shit, like now it sounds cool.
You just don't know.
So we're just trying to not get exasperated and just continue to work with it and then hopefully something cool will come out.
It has the whole experience taught you to be a lot to be more patient. Were you patient or you a patient person anyway?
Oh God, ask Matt.
No, I'm not patient at all, but I mean I don't know, it depends. Maybe with work, I am a little bit more patient. I think it also just makes you kind of like it's made me like aestheticize the concepts around AI as well and kind of like dig deeper into the vocal stuff and.
Maybe kind of like yeah, maybe like conceptualize. You almost have to like.
Imagine what it could do even though it's not there yet, and then kind of like use that as material as well or like you know, that's one of the reasons why we did the training sets, the column response.
Where we would just wait for this elevator to chuck elevator tools closing.
Yeah, so that's why we were doing these kind of training ceremonies where you know, we would do column response singing with the audience to create voice models of the audience to show people how a training set would be made because SPAWN wasn't there yet for the real time system. So we're like, okay, how you know, how do we make a performance out of the making of the data sets? Like actually the whole process of training and all of that,
that's all very performative. I mean, you're performing for SPAWN, so we're like, how do how do you make a performance out.
Of that for the public.
So it's it's made me kind of like have to like open up the process as a performance itself.
Now, I know you would have been asked that this is I imagine this is the thing you have been asked the most since this record came out. I'm going to ask it anyway about your relationship with Spawn people. Is that been the thing that people say, like, yeah, do you feel close? Do you have this bond with Spawn, your AI machine?
I think it depends on what we're working on at the time. I mean, definitely when we were doing a lot of my own voice model stuff that there's like an uncannoness to that or like an timacy there, because I was hearing my voice played back to myself but through a different logic, through like a different intelligence, and so that was Yeah, I mean that's interesting and intimate for sure.
Yeah, but I'm careful not.
To try and you know, it's you know, Spawn's not a human baby.
You don't want to be that my actual baby.
Yeah, I mean the baby metaphor is really useful in a lot of ways, but I want to be careful and not you know, necessarily anthropomorphize her. And that's also why we haven't given her like some sort of avatar kind of form to latch onto, because it's not it's not really about that like humanizing.
You don't want to be that. Persons who meets people at parties and and you say to you, they say, do you have kids? And he say, yeah, I've got I've got a daughter. She's called Spawn.
And then the moms with the human babies are like, oh my god.
I go away and take Spawn out on play god with other human babies. Yeah, you don't really want to be going down that route.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean my friends are pretty patient, but I don't know if they would lose Yeah, patients there.
You grew up in, like Tennessee, a rural and quite religious place.
Right, extremely religious.
Do you get Do you get back that much? John Johnston City? Johnson City?
Right, Johnson City.
Yeah, it's kind of difficult because it requires minimum three planes. Oh okay, it's pretty expensive because it's you know, just not.
Like a very well traveled route.
Do you have family this I do?
Yeah.
I try to get back there as much as possible, but.
Not super often. Sometimes I meet my family in other cities. Yeah, okay, I kind of like meet in the middle situation.
How I mean, have you ever played a show there?
Not in Johnson City, But I played a show in Knoxville, which is a it's like a college town, that's an hour and a half hour and a half west and there is a kind of like an arty music.
Festival there called Big Ears. Okay, and know if you've heard of.
It, good night, I wish I had.
Yeah. Well, one year Laurie Anderson curated it, right, Okay, so it's like I.
Don't know if that's like a sign.
Of approval, but they have really great I mean they have great people, great curation. And yeah, we played that one year and my family came over. That was pretty wild because they were like whooping in the in the back.
How do you think, like in your hometown where you grew up, would your music how would you how do you think that it would go down?
I think it would go down now better than ever before, because there's so much music that might sound familiar. I mean, like the like Frontier, the beginning is this like acapella sacred harp song, and I think that would.
Go down well. And then it would go into the kind of remix of the song and they'd be.
Like whoa, what is this? But there would be that entry point of the you know, the opening a cappella parts. I think there's more entry points for my hometown now than maybe ever before, but it would still definitely be very alien.
Yeah, because there are points of That's what. That's one thing about this record more than your previous two, I think, is that there are those kind of roots in like vocal harmonies and choir singing and that kind of thing. It feels like this record has a bit of all the places that you that you've lived in or into it.
Yeah, in some ways, for sure.
Do you know what you're going to do for your next one? Yet?
That's a cruel question.
Am. My good friend Jalen, She's like, whenever anybody asked her that, she just leave the end of discussion.
She's like, what do you want for me? I just made this thing.
Just give them birth to this baby, don't ask for another one. Now, that is a cruel question. I suppose the only reason I ask it is just because I know how much has gone into this one. It feels like more than and you know, almost any other record I can think of in terms of like to get it there. Yeah, but I suppose that makes it the cruelest questionable. It makes it extra cruel.
To you, I guess, And it doesn't make any sense like my approach I have this like really unwieldy, like time consuming.
Conceptual approach.
Even though that's like a bad word now since that article came out. God yeah, but it's just this, it's a it's a very time consuming approach.
In today's kind of like musical landscape.
It's more about like these kind of like fast releases and like constantly being present, and it's like kind of antithetical to the way that I operate. So who knows what's going to happen to the album format in general. I still like making albums, but of course it's not like it doesn't have to be the definitive format for releasing work. I mean, it's only been around for like how many years, you know, it's there. There are other Yeah, there are other formats.
I don't know. We'll see.
I have some ideas for some some other projects in mind, but I don't want to talk about.
Okay, that's fair enough. And the other thing that's happened since we did our article was, I think a couple of weeks after we met, you were going to go and do your finish complete your PhD.
Yes at Stamford and I did Did you do it? I did?
And did you did you have to how did it go? So this is this was that was a defense we call them, I think we call them vibors. Here is where you go. You go and defend what you've what you've studied exactly, and they say, yes you can have your PhD or no you can't.
Yeah. Yeah, they asked you a bunch of questions and you have to give a presentation and the whole community.
Is there and you had to go to Stamford for this.
Oh yeah, yeah, you have to be there.
You have to give a presentation and it has to be open to the community, so anyone from the community can come and be like.
You lie or whatever. You know, you can have that.
Yes I objected, Yeah, but no one objected luckily, and I got through and then I had to do some tweaks to my text that then I sent in later.
Right, Yeah, so it's all wrapped up.
Now done it is. Yeah, congratulations. How long did how long did you? You did it quite quickly?
No, I did it. No, it wasn't at all. I mean I was touring and.
Releasing Yeah, excuse it was seven years total, Okay, but I mean it's also it's hard to compare it to the UK programs because the US is set up in a different way, like the first year is more kind of like an extended master's program where you're taking full coursework, and the second and third year you're taking coursework and you have a teaching requirement. So there's a lot of teaching training happening in the US system that I don't
think happens so much in the UK system. You're not really required to teach, but it's also funded in the States, so it's like a job. Like, you know, I had funding for like five six years, which is that. I mean, honestly, that's how I kind of like transitioned from working full time.
I used to work at a children's museum.
Did Yeah, I was a manager of the like interactive exhibits there. Okay, So I had like a walkie talkie on my belt and I would sit at my desk working, and then I had a crew who would like go fix exhibits when they would break.
But then when they would go.
Well, luckily it wasn't usually that, but it was more like you know this, like these networked computers aren't talking to each other, and now they can't.
Do their claymation video and everyone's crying, and.
So like when my crew would go on their lunch break, then I would have the walkie talking and it was like, you know, you just like get like a call and you go down there and there's like all these kids and you have to like kind of troubleshoot tech stuff while kids are.
Like trying to get in there, and that's why, you know.
So I have had so many tech meltdowns on stage and people were like, you're always so.
Calm, and I'm like, yeah, like I'm so used to having people like.
Me.
Yeah, it's like it just doesn't anywhere.
I'm just like, if they're just machines, they're either it's either going to work or it's not going to No one's going to die.
Yeah, it's gonna be fine.
Yeah, That's what I was doing before I got into Stanford. I didn't imagine that they would let me into that program like I was.
I was really surprised.
But then when when they let me in, then that was when I was able to kind of like transition to doing music full time because I had this salary and you know, in the States.
It's always this question of like healthcare, Who's.
Going to pay for your health insurance, So going from the museum to Stanford, I was able to have health care and all that kind of stuff.
So yeah, it's always really.
Funny to me when people were like, oh, you went to Stanford.
I'm like, yeah, I mean I got a job, Like.
I got a really cool job, and I was really lucky to get a cool job. But it's you know, it was I don't know, I just find that really funny, but yeah, I was. I was really lucky too that they that they gave me that support and then I was able to kind of transition because then you have a couple of years of funding just to write, and then I was able to continue to tour and to develop. And yeah, it was definitely that like leg.
Up, nice one stuff I hated.
Thanks Stamford.
Did you enjoy the teaching side of things? Did you like that?
I really did?
Yeah.
I mean it depends on the subject, like things that I don't that I'm not that I don't know that much about.
I don't enjoy because I'm just like, sorry, guys, I'm not that much about.
But I was able to develop a course with a musicologist's PhD student who was there, Victoria. She was really interested in writing about kind of like she was really interested in writing about electronic contemporary electronic music in like
an academic way because there hasn't been so much. Of course, there are like little pockets, and me as a practitioner, we kind of like had a nice balance, I think, and so we co taught this class that we were able to design ourselves and it was the Aesthetics of Electronic Music post to nineteen eighty because in.
The academy often often things stop in like nineteen seventy or something.
It's like it's like digital happens, and everyone's like, Okay, we're not gonna.
Talk about that. So we really wanted to.
Yeah, we wanted to talk about contemporary shit that students were listening to.
It sounds good.
It was fun.
Yeah, it was really fun to like listen to what students liked and then be like, oh, okay, like this comes from and then like trace it back to its.
Origins and they didn't know the roots of it.
And then once you kind of like went down that tree, then they all got really into.
The roots of whatever.
You know, Like I don't know, if it's like nine inch Nails is maybe an example, like one of the students, was like super into Nine inch Nails, and I'm like, nine inch Nails is like great like pop writing of industrial music, and like this is the history of industrial music and these are the bands that kind of like started this sound. And and then she got super into that stuff. And yeah, so I don't know that that's fun.
Yeah, that's so fun. Yeah it sounds good. This has been a glamorous setting. We were quite lucky. I think we only had about two people come out to lift and look at us.
Bizarrely, I'm sad that we didn't ask them an interview.
We should have. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, we should have done that. But thank you for coming on the podcast for sure. Yeah, anyway, good night,