LIVINGSTON, the Computer that Writes Folk Music, Is Too Good to Be Real

UPDATE: Svec contacted Motherboard after this article was published and asked that we credit Mathias Kom, frontman of Canadian band The Burning Hell and featured musician on Vol. 2 of LIVINGSTON's output, as LIVINGSTON's "co-programmer." 

Folk music has long been considered a vehicle for powerful human emotions. From the ghostly and plaintive songs of suffering and salvation captured by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in the penitentiaries and cotton fields of the South to the communistic freedom songs of Woody Guthrie, technology doesn't usually fit into the equation.

That's why many sites, including  our sister blog Noisey, understandably lost their shit when Henry Svec, a media studies professor and current Media Artist-In-Residence at the University of New Brunswick - Fredericton, claimed to have built a computer that can write folk songs.

The apparent musical proficiency of LIVINGSTON, the artificially intelligent songwriter in question, raises many questions about authenticity in art, the role of technology in facilitating cultural development, and how we perceive our relationship with increasingly intelligent machines, however limited that intelligence may be.

These questions become all the more interesting if we consider the very real possibility that LIVINGSTON is a hoax, carefully maintained by a byzantine series of masterful media ruses.

LIVINGSTON has supposedly written two volumes of folk songs, the latter of which Svec released this week. LIVINGSTON's songs have equally hilarious and thoughtful titles—see: "Takin' Off My Glasses Tonight" and "I am a Weary Immaterial Labourer In a Post-Industrial Wasteland"—and its lyrics are pretty damn nice, to boot.

Take, for example, this excerpt from "I Have the Peaceful and Easy Feelings" from volume two:

I am feeling I have no use / As an operator and a friend / But this voice keeps whispering in my other ear / And tells me I'll never see you again

Not bad for a computer.

"LIVINGSTON's work is a challenge to my colleagues in the field of folklore, because it forces us to reconsider the parameters of our field," Svec wrote me in an email. "We have a lot to learn from computers like LIVINGSTON."

According to Svec, LIVINGSTON was developed by himself and Mirek Plíhal, a Czech computer scientist he met in 2013 in Dawson City, Yukon while they were artists-in-residence at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture. The computer is essentially a database of Canadian folk music that uses machine learning algorithms to churn out new compositions that Svec wades through, selecting the best to record with a rotating cast of Canadian folk musicians.

Let's unpack this a bit. LIVINGSTON, if real, would have to be one of the most advanced natural language processors on the planet in order to come up with lyrical compositions as cogent and affecting as those on display in Svec's recordings. Computers are currently being used to generate simple news articles, poems, and even entire novels, it's true, but they aren't exactly full of flair or even sense as far as prose goes. Hank Williams, they ain't.

Given that LIVINGSTON was apparently switched on in 2013, we have to assume that it's still pretty early in development, yet it's produced two volumes of, by all accounts, wonderful folk compositions. The mind boggles at the sheer number of nonsensical reams of folk-related word salad Svec must sift through to find the gems.

And then there's the circumstantial evidence. A quick Google search reveals that the only mentions of Czech programmer "Mirek Plíhal" on the web come from Svec himself. I called the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, where the pair supposedly met, and the administrator who answered the phone told me she'd never heard of Plíhal. When I asked Svec about this, he coyly dodged the question.

The moniker "LIVINGSTON" comes from a Canadian folklorist named Staunton R. Livingston—a character Svec invented and used to release a bogus album of lost Stompin' Tom Connors recordings. "Livingston" is a nom de plume Svec employs in various guises, computer form included, to make his artistic statements on the nature of folk culture.

Song courtesy LIVINGSTON/Henry Svec

Why the trickery, then, if LIVINGSTON is a hoax? Svec's not a hack—the project is funded by the Arts Council of Ontario, for one, and has university support. Is it just a media gag? Perhaps an acerbic, if a tad on the nose, piss-take at stale focus group folk-pop like the Lumineers ? Svec's writing seems to indicate that the project is really an invitation to consider how we perceive artificial intelligence and technology as it relates to artistic practices.

"There remains a resistance to taking computer-generated art seriously. Insofar as it has received attention, LIVINGSTON has mostly been tech news, not art news, for instance," Svec wrote. "But it's entirely possible that the rules of art and Canadian folklore will change and that we will develop new ways of understanding these works. Of course, there are already smart people thinking about these very questions."

By evoking the familiar binary of "natural" vs. "unnatural" in so many naive reviewers who believe LIVINGSTON to be real, Svec is laying bare attitudes about technology and art that see tools and machinery as something outside the human experience, instead of an integral part of it since neanderthals fashioned the first brush to make cave art. In true Derridian fashion, the idea of LIVINGSTON and the reactions it receives serve to expose and explode this dichotomy.

Svec's work with LIVINGSTON also has implications for modern conceptions of authorship that hold fast to some kernel of authenticity in the singular humanity of the creator. Here, Svec is a singular author playing at being a generative database, producing traditional cultural forms from a faceless sea of data.

"LIVINGSTON's work ethic and innate disenchantment with celebrity and persona—and with concepts like oeuvre and authorship—might also inspire creative people in diverse cultural fields, including indie music, literature, stand-up comedy, and even contemporary art," Svec wrote me.

On his website, Svec slyly attributes a "communistic" view of folk culture to Livingston, the fake folklorist. Livingston, Svec writes, believed that culture is a collective resource that is held in common by all people, and that technology can draw attention to this point. If we take these to be Svec's own beliefs in disguise, then we might say LIVINGSTON draws attention to this communal and author-less view of folk culture via the facade of high technology.

So, no, in all likelihood LIVINGSTON is not real. But is that a bad thing? Perhaps not. Knowing that what we were really confronting all along was the idea of an artistically talented artificial intelligence is equally as compelling as coming across the real article, in philosophical terms.

Of course, it's unlikely that Svec will cop to any of this. That would defeat the point and probably tarnish some of the magic that has gathered around LIVINGSTON's work like so much internet fairy dust. Even so, in a manner I've come to recognize as uniquely Svecian, he left me with a winking statement about LIVINGSTON's future:

"LIVINGSTON will either dominate the world or become the topic of an excellent dissertation or two."