Announcing Holly+ Auction House with Zora: Submissions open!!!

 ![Photo by Andrés Mañón](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/11297a63-12dd-4ec1-aca6-456b20bec0eb.png?height=998&width=1500)

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/438033d6-2066-4072-b662-8537af786b01.png?height=895&width=601)




I'm excited to announce the Holly+ Zora Auction House! 🪄

https://auction.holly.plus

This site allows anyone to submit artwork made with Holly+ for approval by the Holly+ DAO, a decentralized international group of friends and supporters who steward my digital twin.👭

Every season a new call for submissions is made, and approved works [created with Holly+](https://holly.plus) will be minted as 1/1 NFTs on a limited edition custom smart contract. Profits generated from those sales will be split 50% with the contributing artist, with 40% going to the Holly+ DAO Treasury to fund new tools, and 10% going to me for the use of my likeness. 🧮

Season 1 begins with the auction of the first Holly+ NFTs, two machine learning models, one of my speaking voice, and one of my raw singing voice, minted on a unique custom smart contract. The submission process is now open, and artworks approved by the Holly+ DAO will be minted on the custom contract and auctioned in a few weeks, bringing the genesis contract and season to a close. Once the contract is closed and sale is completed, the DAO will vote on how to use the funds to make new tools for season 2. 🦾

This process is both **generative and collaborative**; rather than randomly generating iterations, instead we are using machine learning tools to aid the generation of submissions from people! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Only Holly+ DAO approved submissions from the community will be minted on the genesis smart contract and that will be sealed on the day of final auction in a few weeks. Holly+ DAO may approve 1000, 100, 50 or 5 depending on the quality of submissions. 🪄

We hope to create a virtuous cycle ♾️ where artists are compensated for their experiments with Holly+, new tools can get funded to allow more artists to experiment, and I receives some compensation for my contribution.

If those NFTs are resold on the secondary market, a 10% royalty will be split 50/40/10 between the original artist, Holly+ DAO and Holly too!

I hope that this model can help challenge the often pessimistic narrative around “deepfakes”, and encourage more people to become interested in performing works through the identity of others! 🥸

This technology is exciting and challenging, and rather than concentrating on ways to limit experimentation by artists I would rather find ways for everyone to have fun, get paid for officially approved work, and contribute to more tools being made!

Read more about the Holly+ project https://holly.mirror.xyz/54ds2IiOnvthjGFkokFCoaI4EabytH9xjAYy1irHy94

Submission Guidelines

Holly+DAO will only approve works [created in some significant way with Holly+](https://holly.plus).

Please make sure that you own the work (both audio and visual) that you are submitting! You can read more about the legal terms of your submission here (https://auction.holly.plus/terms)

Holly+ DAO will prioritise the most creative usage of Holly+ in considering what works to approve. Make something crazy! Please upload an audio file as a .wav and an image file as a .jpg. The image file will be mapped to a 3D transparent model of my head to create continuity in this season. 👩‍🦲

Any work submitted remains yours to do whatever you like with! You can release it on an album, to streaming, online, whatever! I really appreciate if you credit Holly+ but that is at your discretion.

When submitting a work you are granting Holly+ DAO the right to mint that work as an NFT, and you will receive 50% of the profits from any sale made at auction. If your NFT is sold on the secondary market, you will receive 50% of a 10% royalty.

Have fun y’all!

🤝 Holly 💕

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/04836370-0b42-46c1-9b73-c3a00de7d3f1.png?height

Holly+ 👭 🗣️ 🦾

![📸 : Andrés Mañón ](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/efd810c5-a752-4c7e-b32f-1208a4f9a5e5.jpg?height=1000&width=1504)

I'm excited to finally share something I have been working on for the last year🪄 [Holly+](https://holly.plus/)

I am releasing [Holly+](https://holly.plus/) in collaboration with [Never Before Heard Sounds](https://heardsounds.com/), the first tool of many to allow for others to make artwork with my voice, and will distribute ownership of my digital likeness through the creation of the Holly+ DAO 👭

My voice is precious to me! It is 1 of 1 🥰

Voice Models, in combination with machine learning technology, already allow for anyone to clone a voice to generate music and media, and the opportunities and complications inherent to these techniques will only intensify!

This development raises novel questions about voice ownership that I think can be addressed by DAO governance 🤝

I plan to decentralize access, decision making and profits made from my digital twin, Holly+ 👭

Profits made from the commercial usage of my digital likeness will be ingested by the DAO, who are able to vote on new tool creation, and approve official usage of my twin, Holly+ 🧞‍♀️

I will soon be launching a [Zora auction house](https://zora.co/zora/3099) to sell approved works made with my likeness 👩‍⚖️

## Who am I?

I'm an artist and composer 👩‍💻 who has been working with machine learning for many years. My last album [PROTO(4AD,2019)](https://4ad.com/artists/122) was the first to utilize singing neural networks, and I completed my Doctorate at [Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics](https://ccrma.stanford.edu/), where my research focus was on the interplay between machine learning and the voice, and the implications of this technology for IP and vocal sovereignty👩‍🔬

Some AI models already know who I am! Here are some images spawned from my likeness using [OpenAI's CLIP model](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) 🤯

![Latent Visions/VQGAN/CLIP](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/2d755ebb-b136-4e0b-bc47-f5cab587131a.JPG?height=352&width=640)

Here are some links to find me online:

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Herndon) / [Foundation](https://foundation.app/@hollyherndon) / [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hollyherndon) / [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/holly_herndon/)

## Holly+ Voice Tool

The first tool, a custom voice instrument and website by [Never Before Heard Sounds](https://heardsounds.com/), allows for anyone to upload polyphonic audio and receive a download of that music sung back in my distinctive processed voice.

Further tools are in development to allow for spoken and sung phrases, and image generation, to be released later this year.

There is an upload limit of 5 minutes for audio files ⏲️

We do not retain a copy of any original audio uploaded to the tool, but we will archive copies of the output audio so you can share them!

You are free to use the material generated as you see fit, and accreditation is always appreciated! 😎

## What is a Voice Model?

A Voice Model is a deep neural network that can generate raw audio of an individual voice. The network is trained on recorded speech and singing from the target voice, and can be interacted with in various ways, from text-to-speech applications to more complex interactions such as audio style transfer, where audio from one voice can be converted to resemble the target voice, a kind of vocal puppetry 🤖

The recent introduction of projects like DeepMind’s [Wavenet](https://deepmind.com/blog/article/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio), Google’s [Tacotron](https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2) and others have advanced the field of voice generation sufficient to make me confident that generating convincing spoken and sung voices will soon become standard practice for artists and other creatives, as presaged by the popularity of celebrity vocal deep fakes already found all over YouTube.

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