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v-AI-n

A brief window. A nascent AI. Its eulogists have ascribed it a liberationist agency. For whom? From what? But in this moment, a Singing AI

buzzes a reminder that the voice is an assemblage, at once an intimate object and a collective operation; a disturbance. The voice is ready to be asset-stripped. When AI’s biases and algorithms reach an unremarkable ubiquity and sophistication, as it becomes a tescreal hyperstition, then a certain view of the voice’s agency will likely disappear.

As well as a simulation of timbre and a claim to genre, AI Singing currently produces audio files containing erratic and curious hauntings. That is, sonic material uncalled for, that's difficult to describe, and that bears little relation to the initiating prompt or sample for cloning. This is valuable detritus. These AI Hauntings™ reveal downplayed attributes of the voice: its ambiguity, its illusion of interiority, its hallucinatory conjunctions, its operation by other agencies such as the unconscious, capital and the state, and of course histories that are personal and collective, acknowledged and repressed.

A performance of v-AI-n is an attempt to render AI's aural discontinuities in a post-croon setting. That is, by sublating these hauntings in an angular poetry and a dissonant musicality, it is hoped these polyvocal agencies might be better heard.

v-AI-n is also aware that it is an acousmatic piece, that relishes the focus on sound rather than source, the latter often a vanishing mediator, an empty placeholder. ‘Vain’ and ‘vanish’ share the root ‘vanus’.

Is a Singing AI the death of the singer?

Is it vain to attempt an embrace of the very alienation that the

voice enables?

Sung, spoken, groaned or whispered; written, unwritten, imagined and explosive, what agent will sing a song of emancipation?

“No longer latent, the waves are now overt and encouraging.

Storyboard this: you’re cranked in the trolley on the roundabout.

Forget the horizon, this accelerating nervous hyper-stimulation is a chaotic albatross.”

TK August 2025