Holly Herndon: Proto review – dystopia averted! AI and IRL in pop harmony

There's something soothing about how rubbish Google's new predictive email tools are – if AI can't work out what you want to tell your accounts department, then it won't be organising a Terminator-style insurrection any time soon. So what hope does AI have for composing music, if bland office missives are too creatively challenging? California-based electronic composer Holly Herndon considers this moment of slowly emergent machine learning on her third album. Alongside the musicians in her ensemble is Spawn, an AI she created with husband Mat Dryhurst and developer Jules LaPlace, that listened to what the group was composing and mimicked it to create music of its own. It's not always clear which bits are Spawn-created, but Herndon obviously has the final say over how its contributions are used – and indeed, the whole album feels more like an announcement of human authority rather than a capitulation to machines.