WVRPs: When AI, Art & Music collide w/ Jeff Nicholas

Blockchain technology enables creators to integrate diverse components into more comprehensive structures, a process significantly enhanced by Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which afford artists the freedom to unleash their creativity and merge different disciplines. 

This episode investigates the potential of integrating generative art, music, and artificial intelligence through Warp Sound’s Warps Orbs NFTs. 

Founder Jeff Nicholas elaborates on these NFTs—a hybrid of generative pfp art, AI-composed music minted on the Ethereum blockchain—which embody their vision for creative technology and serve as a precursor to a more expansive social music platform. 

“When there’s something new the only thing that i know is that i have to do it otherwise i don’t have the capacity to fully understand it unless i fully operationalize it.” – Jeff Nicholas

Key Highlights:

The Intersection of Music, Art, and AI

Jeff Nicholas described his career arc, which included overseeing VR at Live Nation, constantly operating at the intersection of music, art, and technology. The germ of the Warp Sound idea began with co-founder Chris McGary.

“What if we were to create music and work with technology as a tool as a human machine collaboration to create music”.

Warp Sound spent years proving AI could create commercially viable and really good music. 

Jeff Nicholas addressed the philosophical debate on AI creativity by noting that new music technologies always face resistance. Warp Sound focuses on creative AI. 

Their AI learns to compose music and simultaneously assesses what humans consider “good” or “bad.” 

AI handles computational and repetitive tasks, freeing human creativity and allowing for rapid exploration, such as generating 100 different versions of a beat quickly.

Watch the full video below or read into the key topics discussed in the Podcast ahead:

The Transition to Web3: The PFP Trojan Horse

Initially, Warp Sound was planning a Web2 artist management path for their virtual artists. However, Jeff became deeply involved in NFTs (like the Apes and Cool Cats) and realized the inevitability of building in Web3.

The shift was driven by the desire to build an audience in a way that they feel like they’re part of it. Several factors aligned to push the project into NFTs:

• Community Ownership: The audience could own a piece of the virtual artists and benefit from the character gaining notoriety.
• Rights-Free Music: The AI-generated music is rights free, because the originator is the machine, allowing the team to transfer the rights to you.
• Audience Activation: Blockchain solved the problem of knowing who the community is at any given time and we can activate them and give them new stuff to play with.

The overarching vision is to bring music from the background to the foreground for non-creators to create a more impactful, interactive experience

“If you think back to any memory you have, most likely it’s punctuated by music in some way”.

Warps Explained: Generative Art and Composed Music

Warps is a “janitor of pfp project” with 9,999 individually different pieces. The art was created by Emmy Award-winning artist Andy Poon.

The unique differentiator is the music component: the team fed all traits of pfp art into the AI and the AI then created 9999 tracks based off of the traits of the pfp.

Crucially, this is true AI composition: the difference with ours is that’s not how it started from nothing so the AI actually composed music it composed essentially sheet music. 

Unlike other generative music projects that compile pre-recorded layers, Warps music has no pre-recorded stems and the AI makes decisions based off of the inputs. NFT owners own the art, the music, and the rights to it.

Utility and Community Creativity

The Warps community is segmented into listeners, collectors, and creators.

 Holders own the rights, allowing unrestricted music use. Creators receive music “stems” for remixing in software like Ableton, with secondary market selection compared to crate digging. Warps hosted an Audios contest where 68 remixes were judged by top producers like Young Guru and Mike Shinoda, offering artists unique opportunities. 

Rarity and Generative Ability

Warps intentionally complicates the idea of rarity to challenge holders’ perceptions of value. Beyond visual rarity, the NFTs possess generative ability.

• Generative Ability: This trait refers to the ability to generate other sounds.
• Rarity Tiers: Tiers include Mythical (top rarity) and Gold, Platinum, Diamond records (bottom). Jeff explained that the mythicals will get to do more or create in different ways, but all will have some generative ability.
• Evolving NFTs: Holders will have the ability to upgrade your gender of ability in some ways through actions that will come later. Jeff stated that the NFT owned today is “not its final form the nft is going to be evolving down the line. 

“It kind of messes with everybody’s perception of value and rarity and that was kind of the point we wanted everything to feel valuable”.

Future Vision: Democratizing AI and Powering the Metaverse

Warp Sound AI aims to democratize AI, addressing the technology’s inaccessibility. Scaling requires substantial processing power and server farms, with a future goal of AI in your pocket.

Jeff Nicholas finds a ten-year outlook difficult but foresees that within five years, AI will collaborate with most human artists. He envisions Warp Sound and virtual artists driving music in the currently silent interactive metaverse. Warp Sound currently uses a director tool with nodes to orchestrate performances, allowing the audience to select the flow (e.g., hype, chill, intensity).

Community Connections and Partnerships

The NFT avatars include pins which are homages to projects the team really loves (like an Oni-pin or an LFG pin), upcoming projects, or even the co-founder’s daughter’s project. Regarding Lollapalooza, Jeff clarified that Warps is not playing on the main stage, to avoid inflating expectations. 

However, they have a partnership, and their music was used in the lineup reveal game.

Reading List

Learn more about these topics mentioned in the episode, or explore our library of articles on Crypto, Security, and Regulation on Ledger Academy

• NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)
• Generative Art
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Self-Custody