It’s officially released! Dr. Henry Adam Svec’s “LIVINGSTON: Artificially intelligent Folk Songs of Canada” is making the rounds to great reviews! Wondering what exactly this project IS? You can read the full-set of FAQs as well as download the album at http://folksingularity.com/ Here are two of the basic answers:
What is LIVINGSTON?
LIVINGSTON is an artificially intelligent, digital organism capable of accessing the totality of the history of Canadian folk music (among other corpuses) and generating new yet hyper-authentic Canadian folk objects via her/his algorithmic agents and compression formats. LIVINGSTON does not produce sound, only transcriptions of lyrics and harmonic progressions (with supplementary recording instructions) to be interpreted and performed by humans.
Where was LIVINGSTON made? Who made LIVINGSTON?
LIVINGSTON is the product of collaboration between the Canadian folklorist and song collector Dr. Henry Adam Svec and the Czech programmer and computer scientist Mirek Plíhal, who were artists-in-residence together during the spring of 2013 at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. Although the two initially came to Dawson to work on their own individual projects (Svec on a collection of Klondike “attempted murder ballads,” Plíhal on an iPhone app about Newfoundland), it turned out they were both interested in questions of archivization and integrity. Thus, they pooled their talents and time in an effort to build something that might matter.
Here are a whole bunch of reviews. This album is worth collecting!
http://www.saidthegramophone.cohttp://www.thegauntlet.ca/story/spun-livingston?qt-latest_and_most_popular=0
http://www.thegauntlet.ca/story/spun-livingston?qt-latest_and_most_popular=0
Pink Moth
On March 25th we will be releasing Pink Moth’s incredible new album “Eclipsed. Stay tuned for more info and show dates. In the meantime, check out the video for the title track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEBG8v-pTI
