It’s late November, which can only mean one thing – the avalanche week of late-capitalism-borne holidays following Thanksgiving are upon us. This week on HARK we’re not celebrating Black Friday, Giving Sunday, or Dragon Tuesday – we’re highlighting Cyber Monday (nominally, at least) with two songs sprung from the marriage of art and science. The wholesome-sounding “Love’s Not Just For Christmas” is performed by the London Community Gospel Choir, but it was written formulaically by a team of music experts at the behest of a British real estate investment trust that operates a chain of shopping malls. Then we hear the actually-wholesome musings of a computer trying its best – “Neural Story Singing Christmas” by Neural Story Singing, a recurrent neural network model developed by scientists at the University of Toronto.
