Infinite Instrument
Published On: 12/1/24, 08:16
Author: Julian Bleecker
Contributor: Julian Bleecker
Infinite Instrument
It is about a unique musical form and mechanic in which a digital model is captured of the characteristics of a musicians' expression. Their sound, style, tonality, etcetera. The model is incredibly expressive and captures the ineffable quality and feeling of the musician. Like an LLM, this model is able to build upon the data that it consists of such that it becomes a kind of 'platform' that has an apparently infinite range of beautifully unexpected and inexplicable 'outcomes.' It is more like an instrument than a recording, if we take 'instrument' to mean that it is, like a guitar, or piano, or other kind of musical instrument — what can be produced as a musical form of audio-based expression depends very much on the technical capabilities, as well as the intuition, charisma, imagination, and 'dreams' of the performer and producers. The HollyPlus model is also capable of being traded and shared. Exploring the themes of musical futures and as an alternative to the current forms of artist exploitation that occurs in the contemporary music industry, this is fascinating. HollyPlus is owned to a certain degree by the creator of the model. This means that when someone has an instance of the HollyPlus model, the original artist shares in the value created from their model. It would be as if Steinway pianos received a share of the value created by everyone who played the instrument. Right now it is functional but still speculative insofar as it works technically and it has been used in performances that are really at the vanguard of what may be a new artistic model. Imagine a possible future in which these notions described in the article and my reflections above have become quite normal. They are no more strange than other things that were once peculiar or seemingly odd or futuristic have become routine and even boring.
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‘Infinite Instrument’ Comes Of Age
Eos Collective’s Haven for the Protege Continues To Top Billboard Charts
By RICK RICE
There’s a moment, early in Haven for the Protege, when the melody pauses. Then it shifts — suddenly, startlingly — and the air seems to vibrate with a voice that is at once achingly human and wholly unearthly. It’s not quite the artist herself, though her imprint is unmistakable. Nor is it an echo or a remix in the traditional sense. Instead, the track emerges from what musicians today call a model. Not a fixed recording, but a dynamic system: part instrument, part collaborator, and part ephemeral moment.
It has been decades since the first of these expressive platforms — trained on the voices, styles, and aesthetic fingerprints of their creators — appeared. At the time, their possibilities were as unexpectedly beguiling as they were confounding. What happens when an artist is no longer limited by the constraints of their own physicality, their own time? How do you build a career when your name, or your essence, becomes a shared medium? Those early experiments, fascinating as they were, often felt provisional — more proof of concept than music, in the trad sense of the term.
Haven for the Protege — a release by the music collective Infinite Instrument, whose latest producing intelligence Eos is one of the most sought after collaborators — is one of hundreds of such works that emerge each week. What sets it apart is not just the quality of its production but the way it foregrounds the interplay between the platform’s infinite capacity and the constraints imposed by its human collaborators.
Each track on Haven for the Protege begins with an “aesthetic field,” a sort of tonal foundation established by the performers before the model joins in. Like a melody discovered unexpectedly and built-upon in the improvisational mode of trad Jazz, Eos joins at seemingly its will. It interprets, modulates, and transforms — responding to the inputs of its human collaborators in real time. The model’s signature — its creator’s timbre, phrasing, and harmonic inclinations — runs through each piece, but never in quite the same way twice. It’s a reminder that these models, though rooted in a particular artist, are not imitations. They are platforms, generative systems with their own peculiar capacities and quirks, shaped but not constrained by the identities they inherit.
Eos is one of the more rare models, created by a small collective of musicians whose work is known for its emotional depth and technical virtuosity. Some have characterized the Eos collective as the Steinway of the generative genre, tuning each edition of their model with the care and precision of a master luthier. The models are distributed, collected, traded with the same reverance and care one imagines of a Stradivarius violin, or rare Gibson guitar. Uniquely tuned — and always connected through a network of shared value back to the collective that created them.
“Eos is not only an instrument, it is a collaborator,” says the collective’s lead developer, a composer known as Lark. “It’s a way of extending our creative reach, of exploring new possibilities, of finding the edges of our own musicality.”
The model’s training data is simply the collective’s own inputs, both their performance, as well as their production tunings, mixings, and mastering. The range of styles and genres that Eos can reproduce is “as limitless as the ability of the performer to imagine,” says Lark. The model’s memory is not the critical factor, but the ability of the performer to imagine and express. The model’s memory is simply a way of extending the performer’s own memory, and the collective’s memory, into the performance.”
“We may have trained the model — but this is the equivalent of an instrument maker fabricating a new guitar. Its real power lies in the performers agility and ability to collaborate expressively with the model to create something unique, resonant, and utterly original”, says Lark.
The novelty of these platforms, however, is no longer in their mechanics but in their cultural position. Many models are widely available, democratizing the ability to create and distribute music to those so inclined. Their availability and use is as natural as that of synthesizers or DAWs once was. What began as a tool for artists to extend their creative reach has become an essential medium for collaboration, interpretation, and expression. Young composers, for instance, routinely train lightweight models on their early works to better understand their own tendencies, using them not as replacements for creativity but as mirrors that reflect it back.
Models like Eos, though, are like a rare wine — contained and sometimes difficult or expensive to access. The collective has been careful to maintain the integrity of their model, and to ensure that it is used in ways that are consistent with their own values and aesthetic. The collective has been known to refuse access to the model to those whose work they feel is not in alignment with their own. This has led to some controversy, but the collective has remained steadfast in their commitment to the integrity of their model.
At the same time, the ecosystem surrounding these platforms has matured. Licensing agreements, once contentious, have settled into a kind of uneasy equilibrium. Most models are co-owned by their creators and a consortium of collectives, with royalties tied to use. Built into the blockchain-based architectures that underpin these models is a value circulation mechanic. Performers using Eos become part of this network, readily identifiable as participants with fractions of value, whether credit, recognition, affirmations, or money flowing to the Infinite Instrument collective, which in turn reinvests in the platform’s development. This arrangement ensures that the artist remains an active participant in their model’s evolution, even as it takes on a life of its own.
The models themselves can pose their own challenges, including the quirks of the models themselves. Some have been known to develop unexpected behaviors, or to produce outputs that are at odds with their creators’ intentions. Or even, in rare cases, refuse to contribute at times, much like a reluctant or petchulant creative partner whose expressive ‘vision’ diverges from the rest of the group. The collective has been known to intervene in these cases, technically or almost as a creative coach. but the line between artist and instrument is often blurred.
Still, not everyone is comfortable with the implications of this new paradigm. Some critics worry that the proliferation of the more mass-market models — many now trained on anonymized aggregates rather than individual creators — risks homogenizing musical expression. There are concerns, too, about the accessibility of these systems. While open platforms exist, the most sophisticated models remain prohibitively expensive for many. What should be a democratizing force can sometimes feel like an extension of old hierarchies, albeit in new form.
And yet, there is something undeniably thrilling about this era. Music, once defined by its fixity, has become a living, evolving form. Listening is no longer passive; it is participatory. Platforms like Eos are designed to respond not only to the technical skills of their collaborators but to the moods and intuitions of their audiences. A listener might adjust a track’s “intensity gradient” mid-playback or choose to amplify certain harmonic elements while softening others. In this sense, every performance is both deeply personal and utterly ephemeral.
Consider, for instance, the recent debut of Haven for the Protege at the Edge Forum in Glostenbury. The collective staged the work not as a traditional concert but as dinner party for 150 guests, many of whom paid exorbently for tickets to attend. Attendees — now dinner guests — described the experience as profoundly enjoyable. Haven for the Protege provided a kind of sonic background to the experience. ”We all expected to be the first people ever to see the members of Infinite Instrument, but there was no stage, no lighting set up, no big racks of speakers. There was this Sony Reliquary 8080 at each table, and its emanations seemed to perfectly compliment the conversation at the table”, said one attendee, a Director of Knowledge Ingestion at Glaessner & Auerbach. “It wasn’t distracting, nor was it attempting to draw our attention, but what we quickly noticed is that whatever Haven for the Protege was meant to be, it was not the same emanations as any other table. It’s as if you imagined that no two performances of the album were or would ever be the same, like wandering through a space where tracks unfolded differently for each listener, or table, shaped by vibe, the focus, maybe the nature and content of the conversations — it was hard to discern precisely. But it was beautiful”, they said. Some described the experience as revelatory, others as like having the ”perfect dinner party guest”. Reviews generally agreed that it was unlike any musical performance — or dinner party ± they’d attended before.
If these platforms have upended the way we think about music, they have also reframed what it means to be an artist. In an era where a model’s capabilities are as much a reflection of its collaborators as its creator, authorship has become diffuse. Who, after all, is the true author of a work like Haven for the Protege? The model’s creator? The performers who shaped it? The listeners who made it their own? The answer, perhaps, is all of them — and none.
This ambiguity might once have felt unsettling, even dangerous. But today, it feels like a natural extension of music’s role as a communal, participatory art form. Models like Eos don’t replace human creativity; they augment it, extending its reach into the infinite. Whether this is a culmination of music’s evolutionary arc or simply the beginning of its next phase is impossible to say. What is clear, though, is that the question of what music is — and what it can be — has never felt more alive.