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Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst got their grant to experiment with neural nets together — and started not with an idea, but with two refusals. First: no automating the composer. Endlessly reproducing the canon was, to Herndon, an aesthetic dead end. "I am a composer, and I do not want to replace myself." The second refusal cost more: no taking other people's data. The training set was built only from voices they could pay for — their own vocal ensemble.

Herndon approached the network less as an engineer than as a choirmaster. Spawn — built by Herndon, Dryhurst and developer Jules LaPlace — lived in a glowing gaming PC and took the soloist's spot on stage. She got a name, the pronoun "she" and the nickname "inhuman child". For the first six months, Herndon admits, "everything sounded like ass". The ensemble sang and talked to Spawn; Spawn answered back. In Berlin they held "training ceremonies" where hundreds of people taught her, in group call-and-response, to react to unfamiliar sounds — a secular take on the revival meetings Herndon grew up with in East Tennessee. For "Godmother" she was trained on the percussion of footwork producer Jlin — and built its stuttering beats out of Herndon's voice.

The traces of training were left in the final mix on purpose: dropped notes, garbled words, harmonies no vocal cords could hold. The glitch became the new member's signature. From there, their paths split by instrument. Herndon carried the voice twin on to Holly+ (2021), where the right to her voice is set out in a separate agreement. Dryhurst went after what the dataset argument was really about — ownership and infrastructure: Spawning and Have I Been Trained (2022) let artists search training sets for their work and opt out. The formula behind their joint installation The Call reads like a manifesto: "if all media is training data, including art, let's turn the production of training data into art instead".