Holly Herndon Launches DAO-Managed Vocal Deepfake Platform ‘Holly+’

Experimental composer and singer Holly Herndon has announced Holly+, a web-based instrument that channels audio recordsdata by means of a digital mannequin of her personal voice.

Add a file, and a glitched-out model of Herndon will sing it again to you. In a press release, Herndon has described the undertaking as a type of vocal deepfake.

The undertaking can be owned and ruled by a DAO, or decentralized autonomous group. DAOs are blockchain-based entities that can be utilized as funding collectives—every member will get a sure variety of DAO tokens, which work type of like shares in an organization. Fractional possession of NFTs and different crypto belongings is divvied up in accordance with what number of tokens you might have.

On this case, the DAO owns the rights to the mannequin of Herndon’s voice, and the earnings from the permitted sounds generated by Holly+ are funneled again to token holders.

“Within the occasion of my dying, I really feel extra comfy with distributed possession of the rights to my voice mannequin amongst a DAO of stewards who’re invested in sustaining the worth and repute of my voice than the rights being handed all the way down to somebody much less acquainted with the values and requirements related to my work,” writes Herndon. 

“There may be precedent for music catalog rights being handed all the way down to household estates whose finest curiosity is in making as many brief time period positive factors from these rights as attainable,” she continued. “My hope is that decentralizing resolution making throughout a DAO of stewards will encourage a extra delicate stewardship over these rights by means of debate and shared curiosity!”

Herndon’s DAO is invite-only for now, however which will quickly change, per a tweet:

Holly+ is a collaboration with Never Before Heard Sounds, a studio that’s put out comparable generative audio experiments up to now. Herndon can be plotting an NFT market by way of Zora, a Coinbase-funded public sale home for crypto artwork, which is able to promote “permitted works” created with this system.