For the last few months, I’ve been quietly working on a brand-new project and it’s killed me to keep it secret, but I can’t keep it bottled up anymore—partly because I need your help.

Today, I’m announcing Skittish, a playful virtual space for online events. Skittish brings people together into a game-like interactive 3D environment that’s designed from the ground up for socially-driven events, big and small.

It’s currently in private beta, but you can sign up now for updates and announcements, or follow @SkittishHQ on Twitter and Instagram.

With Skittish, I’m trying to make a space that supports the kind of events that I love to organize and attend: creative, experimental, and deeply social.

Here’s a little teaser!

The Problem

After the pandemic cancelled XOXO last year, I started attending a bunch of virtual events, mostly out of boredom and longing for connecting to other people.

Unfortunately, many of them were pretty uninspiring, basically just fancy webinars with breakout rooms for Zoom. Others were just livestreams with little room for social interaction beyond a global chat room.

Almost all of them left me feeling like I’d either sat through a long meeting or watched a long YouTube video. Was this even an event? Did I actually attend anything?

As depressing as most virtual events were, there were three bright spots of creative experimentation happening over the last year:

1. Experimental Events. The brilliant MUD-like environment created for Roguelike Celebration and the ongoing series of LIKELIKE events showed how event spaces could draw inspiration from games to great effect.
2. Proximity Chat. Second Life has supported spatial voice chat for nearly 15 years, but a crop of experimental new platforms started using spatial/positional audio and video to make virtual parties feel more real.
3. Social Games. Approachable games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Among Us, and Fall Guys were breakout stars of the pandemic, giving us new ways to connect to with friends when we couldn’t be together in person.

There are some amazing projects out there, but I started outlining a hybrid of these ideas: an online event venue for large-scale gatherings that used spatial audio, didn’t assume people were comfortable being on camera, with real-time customization of the space, and built in a 3D engine for a more immersive game-like feel.

More than anything, I wanted it to be optimized for fun: interesting to explore on its own, make new friends, and a vibrant place for creators and event organizers to bring together their communities in a new way.

Grant for the Web

As I was working on the first prototype, it was clear this was far more than a side project, and I’d need additional resources to fund development and design.

Desigan Chinniah encouraged me to apply for Grant for the Web, a grant fund he co-created with Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons to finance projects pushing forward an open standard for monetization on the web.

So, last June, I submitted a grant proposal to build a “virtual venue for playfully-immersive events in the browser,” in which attendees can financially support creators, organizers, and events they love using the Web Monetization API (or traditional payment methods, of course).

Three months later, I found out I received their flagship level grant. By early November, I received the funds and was able to bring on a contract developer to help out.

How It’s Going

In December, I scrapped my initial Three.js prototype and worked with creative technologist Mike Bodge to build a proof-of-concept prototype in react-three-fiber, a powerful React renderer for Three.js, with a thriving community and helper libraries. Unfortunately, existing client work took Mike off the project a month later.

Through his work on react-three-game-engine, a budding game engine for react-three-fiber, I found Brisbane-based developer Simon Hales, who started working with me on Skittish in January. He hit the ground running, adding much of the functionality you can see in the current app.

It’s still early in development, but this is what Skittish supports so far:

• A game-like interactive 3D environment, with a fixed camera perspective, simple navigation controls, and animated avatars
• Positional stereo audio, allowing you wander in and out of conversations naturally, with sound playing relative to your current position
• Inline creation and editing tools for collaboratively customizing the world in real-time with 3D objects
• Embedded inline videos with spatial audio for watching or listening to livestreamed or pre-recorded media from YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and more
• Support for multiple interconnected rooms
• Adding Web Monetization payment pointers for streaming payments to event creators

Special thanks to Sam Buttrick, who created the banners and profile images you can see on social media and at the top of this post. Sam’s a Portland local, a recent PNCA grad, and I loved her work on Instagram so much, I approached her to create some illustrations for this announcement. Go hire her!

What I Need

So that’s what I’m working on! I hope to start running events in Skittish in the next couple months, and opening it up for other people to use for their own communities. In the meantime, I’m currently looking for some help.

Beta Testers. I need a group of willing trusted beta testers to show up once in a while to help load-test, spot performance issues, and give feedback as we build out features. You’ll get work-in-progress previews along the way, and help shape what Skittish becomes. If that sounds interesting, sign up for the mailing list to get notified.

Creators. I’m intent on making Skittish into something that individual artists and creators can use to bring together their own community, whether it’s debuting a new video on YouTube, doing a book reading, a live concert, or playtesting a new game — and make money doing it. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in touch.

Event Organizers. After having co-organized seven years of XOXO, I empathize with the plight facing event organizers right now who are struggling to convince attendees and sponsors to pay for lackluster events. I want to make events that are unique and valuable, worth the time and energy to show up for, and worth paying for, so you can continue to support yourself doing what you love. If you have an idea for an event you’d like to run in Skittish, I’d love to hear it.

Environmental Artist. I’m looking to immediately hire a freelance 3D environmental artist to help design a space for everyone to explore, somewhere between a festival grounds and Disneyland—warm, approachable, and playful. Candidates will be comfortable working in flat-shaded low-polygon constraints optimized for the web. Aesthetically, I’m inspired by the wholesome games movement, and games like Alba, WATTAM, Untitled Goose Game, Ooblets, Windosill, Donut County, and I Am Dead. If that sounds like you, email me a link to your portfolio. Introductions welcome!

Thank you!

Over the years, many of you long-time readers have reached out to me to send me tips or to let me know that you enjoy what I write and share here, and it always means the world to me.

Yesterday I got something notably different in my inbox, and I’m going to publish it here along with my response because I think it’s worth talking about.

Here’s the pseudonymous email I received.

Is Waxy a blog about the internet or is a blog about the personal feelings of the writer? Is it about things you find or make for the internet and share those ideas or is it just a blog where you give us your opinion of how bad Trump is then expect everyone else that reads your blog to agree with your ideas? Is it a blog about how the political right cause all the World’s problems, lead by Trump, then it is your job to let us lesser informed know of this? Is Waxy about turning a blind eye to any bad thing that the Left do so that our minds can only see the ills of the Right who, of course, are lead by Trump? I am so confused.

Is it your vocation in life to tell us how stupid we are and only to show the bumbling of the Right whilst overlooking anything the Left do? Is it that people can only make up their minds if they get biased feedback?

Waxy like so many of my once favourite sites is now only on this planet to tell me one side of the political story so that I can feel bad about myself. What is wrong with people making up their own mind based on ALL the facts or being an individual a scary concept for people with such low self esteem as many of the Left?

Why is it that 95% of us know what an idiot Trump is and most of those 95% don’t give a flying f%$# about American politics yet we have to be bombarded with all his foibles whilst hearing of the saints from the Left. I yearn for the good old days when I could follow and read my fave websites of which Waxy was one and not be bombarded with anti Trump, anti right, pro Left and bury your head in the sand and make up my own mind and not have to read the biased opinions of websites which are now just “safe places”

Disappointed.

I don’t owe anyone a reply and would normally just ignore an angry email like this. But I realized that I’ve never talked about the shift in focus that’s happened here over the last couple years, and I thought it would be worth articulating.

Here’s what I replied:

Waxy.org is, and always has been, my personal sandbox. It’s where I write and share things that I think are interesting or compelling or important that I come across online. In the past, it’s generally been things related to internet culture, copyright and fair use, the intersection of art and code, emerging technology, and the social web.

Right now, those issues just don’t matter very much to me. We’re living in a country facing a badly-mismanaged pandemic that’s killed over 200,000 Americans, a deep distrust of science and the press, the widespread rise of conspiracy theories, racist police violence, an authoritarian takeover of the federal government, a looming election crisis, and a possible civil war.

I live in the U.S., and it sounds like you don’t. That’s great for you, but I have to live here and worry about the safety, security, and future for my family and friends. Quite frankly, it’s hard to think of much else. I still link to fun internet stuff, as I always have, but it’s just one subject of several that matter very much to me right now.

As for accusations of bias, I link to articles that are factual and well-researched from authoritative sources and established publications. But I don’t think there’s “another side” to issues like the mishandling of the pandemic, systemic racism, police brutality, climate change, or the Trump administration undermining the election process. It’s the objective truth, and anything else is just spin.

I’m certainly not forcing anyone to read anything, and I share links that I think are compelling and worth reading. Feel free to read it and make up your own mind. Or unsubscribe if you can’t tolerate viewpoints that challenge your own, if it makes you feel better.

Either way, I’m not going to stop writing about issues like these until things change in this country, and I have the great luxury of focusing my attention on fun and creative things happening online.

Thanks for the feedback.

I hope that clears it up! I welcome all reader mail, anonymous or not. (Preferably nice people, but I’m not picky.) You can always email me or DM me on Twitter.

Today, research laboratory OpenAI announced Jukebox, a sophisticated neural network trained on 1.2 million songs with lyrics and metadata, capable of generated original music in the style of various artists and genres, complete with rudimentary singing and vocal mannerisms.

The Jukebox AI can generate new music in a genre or artist’s style, guided with lyrics and an optional audio prompt, or completely unguided.

Note that Jukebox doesn’t generate lyrics: it can only sing lyrics when they’re provided as input. Without lyrics for guidance, Jukebox generates nonsensical vocal utterances in the style of the original singer. (The lyrics in the Curated Samples section of the Jukebox announcement were generated with an unrelated language model, GPT-2, and used as playful sample input text.)

The resulting work is a clear leap forward in musical quality, though it comes with some limitations.

“While Jukebox represents a step forward in musical quality, coherence, length of audio sample, and ability to condition on artist, genre, and lyrics, there is a significant gap between these generations and human-created music.

For example, while the generated songs show local musical coherence, follow traditional chord patterns, and can even feature impressive solos, we do not hear familiar larger musical structures such as choruses that repeat.”

Even with those limitations, the results are just incredible to explore. I recommend starting with the featured samples from the blog post, and then diving into the uncurated library of over 7,100 song samples.

Highlights

Just digging around the sample library, I found so many intriguing examples. It’s the uncanny valley of music: machine-hallucinated melodies and nonsensical DeepDream-esque vocals, but often capturing the style and mannerisms of the artist it’s trying to mimic.

In this example, the Jukebox AI is fed the lyrics from Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and told to generate an entirely new song in the style of Kanye West.

With no lyrics for guidance, the AI tries to generate an entirely new David Bowie song. Have fun making out the lyrics!

Again, with no lyrics to guide it, the AI tries to generate an entirely new Prince song. I asked Anil Dash about it, and he said it sounded like it was trained heavily on Prince’s 2000s-era work.

A neural network tries to write a Tori Amos song.

A.I.-generated Al Green is pretty listenable. If the audio fidelity was better, I’d put this on at a dinner party. The machine-generated vocal utterances (you can’t really call them lyrics) are nonsense, but it hardly matters.

In one of the stranger examples, the OpenAI researchers fed the lyrics of Avril Lavigne’s “Dumb Blonde” to the model—and told it to make a Talking Heads song, complete with David Byrne’s vocal mannerisms.

For the Continuations collection, researchers prompted the AI with the real lyrics and first 12 seconds of the original song, and then just… let it loose. Listen to this version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that rapidly goes sideways once the leash is off.

I wonder if this is what Let It Be-era Beatles sounds like to people who hate the Beatles and/or don’t speak English.

Find any great ones in the collection? Post a comment with your favorites.

Unfortunately, making your own songs won’t be as easy. While the code is available, OpenAI says it takes three hours to render 20 seconds of audio on an NVIDIA Tesla V100, a $10,000 GPU. You can experiment with it on Google Colab for short, low-quality samples, but rendering times and memory limits may make it challenging.

Legality

Just two days ago, I wrote about how Jay-Z ordered two deepfaked audio parodies off YouTube, the first known example of someone claiming copyright over an AI voice impersonation and the first time YouTube removed a video for it.

One of the OpenAI researchers on the project addressed the legality question directly, stating that they believe training the AI on copyrighted material is fair use, but sought clarification from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for clarification.

But what about using the AI to generate new music? If I make a new album of Britney Spears songs, in her style and in her voice, who owns the copyright for that work?

I’d refer to the discussion of copyright and fair use from my earlier post, which applies here across the board. In short, it depends on how it’s used.

New music generated from a corpus of copyrighted music by a single artist may be considered a derivative work, in which case, only the original elements would be protected by copyright—and what constitutes “original” in this context? Machine-generated melodies and lyrics? The vocal performance? We’re in untested legal waters.

While there’s no federal law for personality rights, many states have recognized the right to control your likeness for commercial use, either by common law or statutes. In one notable example from 1988, Bette Midler was able to win her case against Ford Motor for their use of a sound-alike singer in advertising.

But typically, personality rights statutes would only apply to commercial uses, and not the wide array of non-commercial use for creative remixing.

Even if it’s found to be copyright infringement, the use of AI-generated music for parody, criticism, and commentary should be protected under fair use, but only a court can decide that on a case-by-case basis.

The Future Is Here

In Robin Sloan’s first novella, Annabel Scheme, a quantum computer populates a massive file server with music that never existed in this dimension.

Until this year, Annabel Scheme’s file server was the stuff of science fiction.

With the release of OpenAI’s Jukebox, the future is here and the world of music just got much, much weirder.