Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #44 w/ Hornbach 🔨, Meta's Text-to-Audio 🔊, Brain Waves-to-Audio 🧠🎶, Art and Money 💰🎨, and the Dutchman Who Fought IS 🇳🇱⚔️
Dear reader.
Edition number 44 here of the bi-weekly-ish newsletter by yours truly, Marcel Alexander Wiebenga. Hopefully, this edition catches you in a final ray of sunshine of this summer season on a pearly white beach somewhere.
This edition includes an excellent Hornbach campaign, Meta's new text-to-audio generator, brain waves that recreate Pink Floyd songs, a 22-minute YouTube film on the odd economics of the art market, and a podcast of the Dutch guy who joined the fight against IS.
Enjoy!
1. Hornbach Embraces Limitations
Space as a Creative Catalyst
My all-time favorite philosopher, the American-Italian Tony Soprano, had many life rules that deeply resonate with me. One of his simple yet profoundly effective explanations for organizational structures was "Shit runs downhill, money goes up” - a principle that has stuck with me. Another gem that struck a chord is his perspective on the limited space in our increasingly crowded world. As he shouted/stated at his son, "Buy land, A.J., 'cause God ain't making any more of it."
This universal scarcity of space is the driving force behind the new campaign for DIY superstore Hornbach. In this campaign, we are told the tale of a man inhabiting a world of square-meter rooms. While this might initially evoke feelings of confinement, the film ingeniously showcases the boundless possibilities within the tiniest of spaces.
This 60-second film isn't just an entertaining story; what sets it apart is that every element is apparently meticulously crafted by hand. From the bedroom to the vertical dining room, no special effects were employed.
In a time when another wave of digital transformation is reshaping our creative processes and redefining creativity itself, witnessing content that doesn't rely on this digital sorcery is genuinely refreshing. Not so coincidentally, this approach is perfectly aligned with the Hornbach brand and its core product concept.
2. The Evolution of A.I. Text-to-Audio
Meta's AudioCraft's Step Forward
Meta recently introduced an open-source tool called AudioCraft that allows users to create music and sounds using generative A.I. It functions as a text-to-audio generation model and is the most impressive one I've seen so far. This concept is similar to the text-to-image generation models we've become familiar with. Still, despite a fantastic step forward, it is not nearly as advanced in output quality, estimated to be about a year and a half behind its text-to-image counterpart.
Meta has developed three A.I. models that each serve different functions in generating sound. MusicGen allows users to input text and transform it into music. Meta claims that the model has been trained using 20,000 hours of music either owned by the company or licensed specifically for the purpose of training the model. This is a clever way for Meta to avoid potential copyright issues. AudioGen, on the other hand, creates synthesized sounds like barking dogs or footsteps based on written prompts. The training for this model was done using publicly available sound effects and introduced the concept of text-to-sound design. Finally, Meta's EnCodec decoder has been enhanced with A.I. to compress audio files without compromising quality. This is particularly useful as excessive manipulation of audio files often results in a loss of quality.
You can listen to examples of the generators on the AudioCraft website. Additionally, there is a pretty-pretty-pretty impressive walkthrough of this pretty-pretty-pretty big step forward below.
3. Decoding Brain Waves
Recreating Pink Floyd's Music from Neurons
Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and recreate the song based only on those neuronal patterns. Two weeks ago, the research produced a recognizable albeit muffled and watery version of Pink Floyd's 1979 song, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)."
Before this, researchers had figured out how to use brain activity to reconstruct music with similar features to the song someone was listening to. Now, "you can actually listen to the brain and restore the music that the person heard," said Gerwin Schalk, a neuroscientist who directs a research lab in Shanghai and collected data for this study.
All over the press, it is stated that this "offers a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can't speak." But, to me, this seems more like a first step towards a 1984-esque type of mind reading.
I do not like this…
I do not like this at all!
However, please have a look and listen for yourself to discover more.
4. Economics of Exclusivity
The Art World's Scammy Mechanisms
One of my favorite books is "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art." It's a fascinating "Freakonomics" approach to exploring the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. The book delves into why record prices were paid at auctions for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006, with even higher peaks in 2007. The author delves into the realms of money, desire, and self-importance to demonstrate that art, in itself, lacks intrinsic value and instead specific external factors make certain artworks valuable while others remain overlooked.
A YouTube video I encountered this week, linked below, offers an applicable update on the same concept. The fundamental principles still hold true, and much like numerous other facets in our era of late-stage capitalism, have become even more extreme.
If dedicating roughly 10 hours to reading the aforementioned book is too much of a commitment, the 22-minute explanatory video below provides an excellent alternative.
5. Modern Heroism from an Unlikely Hero
Meet The Dutchman Who Fought IS
My girlfriend recently shared a story about someone she met nicknamed "Andok." In 2017 a 23-year-old Dutchman from The Hague joined the Kurds as part of the Syrian Democratic Forces to liberate Raqqa from the clutches of I.S.. She described him as an amiable, soft-spoken, and regular "guy-like-you-and-me" who, in 2023, is considering a career as a furniture maker. After hearing this story, a torrent of questions instantly filled my mind.
Sam van Raalte, a former Editor-in-Chief at Vice turned podcast producer, delves into this insane and incredible story in a two-part series of his podcast titled "De Ondergrond." He asks all the questions I had in my mind and explores a strangely unique hero's journey, a quest for meaning, the intricate blend of harsh daily reality, and the sometimes strangely beautiful aspects of a life entrenched in war.
This podcast is by far the most captivating storytelling Podcast I've ever encountered. It's Dutch spoken though, but if you are among the 30 million Dutch speakers, do give this a listen!
Thanks for reading.
As always: be kind, be sweet, and enjoy the alpha omega of summer.
Marcel