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Contents
editorial
KOFI AGAWU
African Art Music and the Challenge of Postcolonial Composition
PAUL ZILUNGISELE TEMBE
China’s Effective Anti-Corruption Campaign
DILIP M. MENON
Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South
BEN WATSON
Talking about music
Theme AI in Africa
blk banaana
An (Other) Intelligence
VULANE MTHEMBU
Umshini Uyakhuluma (The Machine Speaks) – Africa and the AI Revolution: Exploring the Rapid Development of Artificial Intelligence on the Continent.
OLORI LOLADE SIYONBOLA
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in Africa
CHRIS EMEZUE & IYANUOLUWA SHODE
AI and African Languages: Empowering Cultures and Communities
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
Toward Misrecognition. | Project notes for a haunting-ting
SLINDILE MTHEMBU
AI and documenting black women's lived experiences: Creating future awareness through AI-generated sonics and interpretive movement for the future of freeing suffering caused on black bodies.
ALEXANDRA STANG
Artificially Correct? How to combat bias and inequality in language use with AI
BAKARY DIARRASSOUBA
Bambara: The Jeli (Griot) Project
ROY BLUMENTHAL
Artificial Intelligence and the Arcane Art of the Prompt
AI GENERATED
"AI on Artificial Intelligence in Africa" and "Exploring its impact on Art and Creativity"
JULIA SCHNEIDER
AI in a biased world
MBANGISO MABASO
Bana Ba Dinaledi: Telling African Stories using Generative AI Art.
ALEX TSADO & BETTY WAIREGI
African AI today
BOBBY SHABANGU
Using Artificial Intelligence to expand coverage of African content on Wikipedia
DARRYL ACCONE
Welcome to The End of Beauty: AI Rips the Soul Out of Chess
VULANE MTHEMBU & ChatGPT
Hello ChatGPT - A conversation with OpenAI's Assistant
DIMITRI VOUDOURIS
Evolution of Sιήκ
STEFANIE KASTNER
Beyond the fact that most robots are white: Challenges of AI in Africa
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Some notes from herri’s full stack web developer on the AI phenomenon
galleri
THANDIWE MURIU
4 Universal Truths and selected Camo
ZENZI MDA
Four Portals
TIISETSO CLIFFORD MPHUTHI
Litema
NESA FRÖHLICH
Agapanthus artificialis: Biodiversität im digitalen Raum. Vierteilige Serie, Johannesburg 2022.
STEVEN J FOWLER
2 AI collaborations and 9 asemic scribbles
PATRICIA ANN REPAR
Integrating Healing Arts and Health Care
SHERRY MILNER
Fetus & Host
borborygmus
JANNIKE BERGH
BCUC = BANTU CONTINUA UHURU CONSCIOUSNESS
GWEN ANSELL
Jill Richards: Try, try, try...
VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI
Nguni Machina remixed
AFRICAN NOISE FOUNDATION
Perennial fashion – noise (After Adorno).
RAJAT NEOGY
Do Magazines Culture?
NDUMISO MDAYI
Biko and the Hegelian dialectic
LEHLOHONOLO MAKHELE
The Big Other
frictions
KHAHLISO MATELA
At Virtue’s Zone
DIANA FERRUS
In memory of “Lily” who will never be nameless again
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Six Poems from the Shadows
SIHLE NTULI
3 Durban Poems
SIBONELO SOLWAZI KA NDLOVU
I’m Writing You A Letter You Will Never read
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships episode 3
claque
SIMON GIKANDI
Introducing Pelong Ya Ka (excerpt)
UNATHI SLASHA
"TO WALK IS TO SEE": Looking Inside the Heart - Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s Pelong ya Ka
VANGILE GANTSHO
Ilifa lothando – a Review of Ilifa by Athambile Masola
ZIZIPHO BAM
Barbara Boswell found in The Art of Waiting for Tales
WAMUWI MBAO
Hauntings: the public appearance of what is hidden
CHARL-PIERRE NAUDÉ
Dekonstruksie as gebundelde terrorisme
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili - A Review
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Taking radical optimism beyond hope - Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South Africa’s Shack Settlements
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
WHITE MISCHIEF – Our past (again) filtered through the lens of coloniality: Andrew Smith’s First People – The lost history of the Khoisan
CHANTAL WILLIE-PETERSEN
BHEKI MSELEKU: an infinite source of knowledge to draw from
JEAN MEIRING
SULKE VRIENDE IS SKAARS - a clarion call for the importance of the old and out-of-fashion
GEORGE KING
Kristian Blak String Quartets Neoquartet
ekaya
PAKAMA NCUME
A Conversation with Mantombi Matotiyana 9 April 2019
KYLE SHEPHERD
An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection on Process
PAULA FOURIE
Ghoema
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Art of Cape Town Singing: Anwar Gambeno (1949-2022)
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Something in Return, Act II: The Blavet-Varèse project
STEPHANUS MULLER
Afrikosmos: the keyboard as a Turing machine
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Ubizo and Mental Illness: A Personal Reflection
off the record
FRANK MEINTJIES
James Matthews: dissident writer
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Platfontein, a place the !Xun and Khwe call home
NEO LEKGOTLA LAGA RAMOUPI
A Culture of Black Consciousness on Robben Island, 1970 - 1980
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES
Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality*
ARYAN KAGANOF
An interview with Don Laka: Monday 10 February 2003
JONATHAN EATO
Recording and Listening to Jazz and Improvised Music in South Africa
MARKO PHIRI
Bulawayo’s movement of Jah People
STEVEN BROWN
Anger and me
feedback
MUSA NGQUNGWANA
15 May 2020
ARYAN KAGANOF / PONE MASHIANGWAKO
Tuesday 21 July 2020, Monday 27 July, 2020
MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER
Monday 26 July 2021
SHANNON LANDERS
22 December 2022
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
the selektah
CHRIS ALBERTYN
Lost, unknown and forgotten: 24 classic South African 78rpm discs from 1951-1965.
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
CHRIS BRINK
Reflections on Transformation at Stellenbosch University
MARK WIGLEY
Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #08
  • borborygmus

VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI

Nguni Machina remixed

Part 1: Nguni Machina: Explorations in AI, neural networks/machine learning music generation
by Vulane Mthembu

The initial motivation for the Nguni Machina project was driven by curiosity: How compelling can AI-generated music sound in 2021? As this was in itself a very subjective question, without a clear-cut answer, I had to establish some form of yardstick to gauge the success of the project.

This is where I turned to the age-old Turing Test proposed by one of the earliest figures in Artificial Intelligence, Alan Turing, who himself in the early developments of AI theory had dabbled in rudimentary art created using an early computer in 1951. The Test: a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. If the art created by the machine is indistinguishable in a blind test from its human counterpart, this would pose some measure of success.

The results were surprising, they were flourishes of “artistic brilliance” in some of the pieces. This led to the development of Nguni Machina into a more expansive project that would not only address AI but other fields of particular interest.

Nguni Machina is open source and released under the creative commons license to encourage interaction and interrogation of its questions.

The questions:
Who owns art created by AI?
What is the role of a human artist in the era of compelling AI-created art?
How easy is it to create such works and the practicality of the exercise?

The project was created using Google’s Magenta which is an open-source research project exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process and MuseNet AI, a deep neural network that can generate musical compositions from collected training data from many different sources. using large collections of MIDI files spanning several genres, including jazz, pop, African, Indian, and Arabic styles. Additionally, a MAESTRO dataset was used..

It was important that I did not interfere with the AI in any way nor introduce any human assistance in the complete album creation process from composing and arranging to mixing and mastering which was all done by the machine. This was done to ensure an as accurate as possible representation of what AI is able to create without any human assistance besides the initial data set training.

Also, it was important that the album did not overstay its welcome and remained with a relatively short runtime which ended up being 5 minutes, enough time for the audience to grasp the concept and allow interpretation of its implications. AI-created music is not anything new, as great examples recently by Babusi Nyoni with his Gqom Robot and others have proven to be exciting explorations of what is possible if we let the robots run free in popular culture.

There are two major camps of thought in terms of how AI in its current or immediate future could be:
AI as a collaborator
AI as a creator

Could our collaboration with AI lead to new kinds of art we’ve never before imagined?

Resources

Link: here
Soundcloud: here
Bandcamp: here
A /divide by zero research project.here
Link to all MIDI and audio files: here

In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2019.
MuseNet by Open AI
Payne, Christine. “MuseNet.” OpenAI, 25 Apr. 2019.
This excerpt was initially published on Medium on 22 May 2021

Markus Popp (Oval), Scanner, Ken Ishii, David Toop, Paul Shutze.

PART II: A Human and a Machine Collaborating 
by Heikki Soini

Last year I was asked to make a remix of a song that was originally made by artificial intelligence. A person who asked me this question was Vulane Mthembu and he had just released the first fully AI-generated music album in Africa called Nguni Machina. Vulane knew me and I’m sure that he was certain that I would answer his call. The question from the beginning was more or less about the music. How does music sound when it is made entirely by AI from composing and arranging to mixing and mastering?

I had made remixes for other artists before this, but there had always been a mutual interest in a certain type of music genre and respect towards the artist whom I was remixing. Now I was dealing with a faceless computer. Could I possibly relate to the music enough to make a remix? I didn’t have any relationship with the real artists of this project, which was Magenta by Google MuseNet AI. When I was a teenager sucking musical influences from death metal to progressive rock and jazz like a sponge, tools like Magenta and MuseNet AI were just science fiction.

This is a little embarrassing to admit, but when I was listening to Nguni Machina my first reaction was a relief. I didn’t quite know what to expect and how good AI was at making music. As a silly and proud musician, I had the urge to compare my skills to a machine.

Now when I heard this clumsy music that sounded like it was played by a beginner with cheap midi instruments, I felt more at ease. After finding a nice piece of melody I knew that I could do this.

The original melody that I picked was played entirely by a sound that modulated the cello, I guess. There were no chords or rhythm elements. I ended up sampling just the first 7 seconds of the original track and composed my whole version around that main theme.

Movement 1 iKhwezi (Venus)

I started with transcribing the melody and then built up the harmonies. Because of this foolish competition that I had in my head with the AI, I wanted to make the chord progression as complex as possible and the same thing happened with drums. I can honestly admit that it was all just a show-off – I wanted to beat the machine. The last thing I did was to scratch a vocal line concerning AI from a south African artist called Kwela from another project that we did together. After that, I felt that I was ready.

Did I manage to beat the machine in creativity and is that even relevant by any means, I leave that for you to decide? One thing is for certain and it is that artificial intelligence has come to the arts and music to stay. There is no turning back now.

Movement – – Output – Stereo Out

Nguni Machina: Collaborations

Nguni Machina Resources

/ NGUNI MACHINA: Open-source neural network explorations in artificial intelligence-generated music. Released under the Creative Commons (cc) license for everyone to freely remix, share, rearrange, destroy or improve as they wish. Published 10.05.21

Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset:
Curtis Hawthorne, Andriy Stasyuk, Adam Roberts, Ian Simon, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang, Sander Dieleman, Erich Elsen, Jesse Engel, and Douglas Eck.

“Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset.”

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