HOPE (Heuristic Oscillation Prediction Engine) is a machine learning synthesiser that plays back when spoken or played to. Its main goal is to create conversations between a human artist and an artificial one, using sound. Inspired by a common exercise in jazz improvisation, where two instruments ‘talk’ to each other, this synthesiser works in real time and can play piano, drums and all kinds of funky waveforms. It can also take its own output as new input, iterating on itself and creating an endless feedback loop of new sounds, challenging ideas of creativity and artistic production.
Its accompanying essay, Conversing With AIs – written just before the ongoing cultural obsession with artificial intelligent took hold – touches on the importance of demystifying AI as well as the creation and ownership of art in a future (that has now arrived with a bang) where the creative process becomes a hybrid product of human and machine intelligence.
Though my thoughts today, five years after writing this research paper for my bachelors, have grown more nuanced, and perhaps more skeptical of the very idea of so-called 'machine' (or 'artificial') intelligence, this essay remains a fun example of the relative calm before the storm that became ownership on an internet saturated by generative AI.