An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: Coditany of Timeness” is a convincing lo-fi black metal album, complete with atmospheric interludes, tremolo guitar, frantic blast beats and screeching vocals. But the record, which you can listen to on Bandcamp, wasn’t created by musicians. Instead, it was generated by two musical technologists using a deep learning software that ingests a musical album, processes it, and spits out an imitation of its style. To create Coditany, the software broke “Diotima, ” a 2011 album by a New York black metal band called Krallice, into small segments of audio. Then they fed each segment through a neural network — a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain — and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI
Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including—brace yourself—Reddit! We though we’d seen more kittens in the news recently. Read more… 
As part of the site’s ongoing Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Made series, MSN has a video about Mexico’s Richart Sowa, a former carpenter who became interested in ecological engineering and left his job to spend over six years building a manmade island made from mostly recycled materials. Read more… 
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes “Michael S. Rosenwald reports in the Washington Post that, according to cognitive neuroscientists, humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online at the expense of traditional deep reading circuitry… Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s challenging novel The Glass Bead Game. ‘I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it, ‘ says Wolf. ‘It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.’ The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. … Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. … Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade our ability to deal with other mediums. ‘We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you, ‘ says Andrew Dillon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.