Culture / Music

Irrational self-belief is one of the reasons villains deeply resonate across culture, says Kevin Wynter, a professor of media studies at Pomona College. “In a repressive society such as ours that champions conformity to better cultivate…

The birth of ChatGPT brought a collection of anxieties regarding how large language models allow users to quickly subvert processes that once required human time, effort, passion, and understanding. And further, the tech sector’s often…

Spotify Wrapped’s animated yearly recap of your listening habits—at once beloved and reviled—is back again. But in 2024, the flashy visuals will be accompanied by a brand-new audio add-on crafted with artificial intelligence.Starting today,…

“It needs to be more transparent,” Wizard said. “This person won. Why did they win, by what margin, and with what technical details? We have to put in a lot more work to make it more easily understandable.” Those might not have been…

Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s ongoing feud already had high marks for being the most technology-fueled rap beef of all time. Dis tracks on Instagram, lyric breakdowns on podcasts, concerts livestreamed on Amazon Prime Video. This week, though,…

The first advancement in years came in May, when a user on the buzzing Reddit community r/TheMysteriousSong found a reference to Hörfest, a contest for amateur bands the radio station held every year in Hamburg, Germany. “It was a very…

Not all AI tools are the generate-from-scratch types like Google’s MusicFX, Suno, and Udio that independent creators like Hatcher use—there are also ones for extracting stems, for mixing and mastering, and for brainstorming lyrics, all of…

Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, over and over again, all across the internet.On Instagram, the band has been repurposed as a comedic device for dunking on President Joe Biden; on…

The Vaporwave album Conditions at Hickory begins with static, as if you’re tuning in to a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily Commute” start out humdrum and benign enough. Then, the mood shifts. Sounds come…

Similar to the G-Funk sounds that still make plenty of cameos in West Coast hip-hop (see: Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”), the stomp sound isn’t something Barber actively notices. It’s simply “in the air now.”Barber points out that the…