Holly Herndon

Holly Herndon (born 1980 in Johnson City, Tennessee) is a Berlin-based composer who earned her doctorate at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Long before generative AI hit the mainstream, she was treating machine learning as an instrument: her 2019 album PROTO was built around Spawn, an AI “baby” trained — with consent — exclusively on the voices of Herndon and her ensemble.

Consent as an art form

In 2021 she launched Holly+, a “digital twin” that lets anyone sing through a machine-learned model of her voice, governed by a DAO that shares profits from approved uses. Announcing it, she argued that vocal deepfakes were inevitable and that the answer was structured experimentation rather than panic — an approach later echoed by Grimes’s Elf.Tech.

With partner Mat Dryhurst she then founded Spawning, a startup “building the consent layer for AI.” Its tool Have I Been Trained? lets artists discover whether their work sits in popular training datasets and register opt-outs, and its API lets AI companies honor those wishes — infrastructure that made Herndon one of the few figures respected on both sides of the training-data war.

Her art practice has kept pace: the Herndon-Dryhurst work xhairymutantx appeared in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and their exhibition The Call, built from newly commissioned choral datasets, filled London’s Serpentine gallery the same year. Herndon’s consistent position is that AI will not kill music — but that artists must own the models, the data, and the terms.