aimusicstudies2024

The First International Conference in AI Music Studies

December 10-12 2024 Stockholm, Sweden

Location: Stallet Stallgatan 7, Stockholm (T) Kungsträdgården

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Prospects, Challenges and Methodologies of Studying AI Music in the Humanities and Social Sciences

AI music (music generated by or with artificial intelligence technologies) is now part of established music ecosystems. While only a few years ago such music was “on the fringe”, it is quickly becoming more present and moving into the mainstream due in large part to the commercial exploitability of the technology, what it produces for what it costs, and its growing public accessibility (complete with claims of “democratizing” music production and composition). The development and application of AI to music creation is attracting significant sums of money from private circles, not to mention considerable efforts in academic engineering circles; yet, perhaps with the exception of intellectual property (e.g., legal ownership) and ethics (e.g., responsible use), many topics of AI music remain by and large under-explored by critical examination and reflection in the humanities and social sciences. This motivates several key questions for critical analysis and reflection:

  1. How can the AI music ecosystem and its components be formally studied, and what considerations must be made to make sense of it?
  2. What challenges arise in the application of established disciplines, such as musicology or ethnomusicology?
  3. What are the prospects and challenges for AI Music Studies for the Humanities and Social Sciences in general?
  4. What is needed in terms of new methodologies for this area of study, and what interdisciplinary connections are required?
  5. How are copyright, and intellectual property more generally, being challenged by the emergent music ecosystem being populated by AI music?
  6. What are the implications of AI Music in terms of economic, environmental and sociocultural sustainability?
  7. What are perspectives from music ecosystems other than the hegemonial popular music ecosystem of the Global North?
  8. What are the positions of music cultures that so far remained largely outside of the digitalization of cultural data?

The First International Conference in AI Music Studies 2024 explores the prospects, challenges and new methodologies required for the study of AI music within the Humanities and Social Sciences. It aims to bring into conversation scholars working in music computing, musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, ethics, economics, feminist and posthumanist studies to help define and develop, or even challenge the need for, a discipline of AI music studies. Further motivation for this conference comes from: B. L. T. Sturm, K. Déguernel, R. S. Huang, A. Holzapfel, O. Bown, N. Collins, J. Sterne, L. Cros Vila, L. Casini, D. Alberto Cabrera, E. A. Drott, and O. Ben-Tal, “MusAIcology: AI Music and the Need for a New Kind of Music Studies.” SocArXiv, 2024.

Financial support for the conference comes from:

  1. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
  2. Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien
  3. ERC-2019-COG No. 864189 MUSAiC: Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism

Keynote Speaker

Professor Georgina Born

The keynote speaker of the first conference is Dr. Georgina Born, Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London.

How to Found a New Field – or, Music’s Challenges to AI Studies

Abstract: This First International Conference in AI Music Studies aims to inaugurate a new field. It is accompanied by a paper asking: ‘is a new kind of music studies needed’ to analyse AI music? These initiatives raise not only what impact AI is having on music, but how music changes the way we think about AI. In this synoptic keynote I pursue these questions, taking three angles on the challenges posed by AI to music and music to AI, each condensing wider realms of debate. Rather than start afresh, I follow classical media theory in breaking down the communicative process into three analytical moments: creation or production; curation and reception; and the question of the object itself, AI-mediated music. Each such moment of AI music has drawn attention and concern, though the effect can be a fragmentation of perspective, a becoming-stuck in particular sets of issues – something the interdisciplinarity of AI studies has not impeded. One of the less discussed yet major dimensions of human life put on the agenda by AI music is aesthetics: aesthetics as a feature of musical creativity and imagination that comes immanently to be vested in the musical object – performance, work, track or ‘song’; and aesthetics as a quality of musical reception. Thus, if the global debates on AI have been transfixed by ethics, then AI music studies bring to the table an urgent and transformative concern with aesthetics and, more broadly, expressive cultures. A focus on aesthetics and creativity, however, means also addressing the conditions that bear on them, posing the imperative to overcome the gap between, say, analyses of the political ecology and political economy of AI and their effects on musical experience. In this light, my lecture will proceed by examining: in relation to creation and production, questions of aesthetic value and of vernacular creativity; in relation to curation and reception, recommendation, personalization and the shaping of aesthetic subjectivities; and in relation to the object itself, how AI is propelling the evolution of music’s ontologies. Among the writers with whom the lecture will be in dialogue are Hayles’s (2017) idea of the cognitive nonconscious, Prey’s (2017), and Lury and Day’s (2019) accounts of personalization and recommendation, and Wilf’s (2023) portrayal of computational creativity in jazz. To found a field of AI music studies, I suggest, necessitates taking stock synoptically in this kind of way, utilising the rich critical resources of the humanities and social sciences to probe the speculative leaps of technology and discourse that otherwise go unchallenged. But equally, it means holding up paradigms from the social sciences and humanities forged in earlier mediatised eras and retuning them for the AI music present.

Schedule

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Detailed Schedule (Google Doc)

Accepted panel

Accepted papers

Conference registration

We have reached maximum capacity, so registration is now closed.

Other information

Please send questions or comments to aimusicstudies2024@kth.se.

Organising Committee

Steering Committee

Archive

Call for presentations, panels and workshops

We are seeking presentations, panels and workshops for the conference. Each presentation will be given 20 minutes in a session, and each session will conclude with a podium discussion of its presented works. Each panel will have 3-5 participants, and last at least 60 minutes with audience discussion. A workshop consists of two hours of directed work and discussion around a topic. To submit a presentation, please write an abstract of no more than 300 words about your work and how it relates to the core themes of the conference. For panels, please write a description of the topics to be discussed and composition of the panel. For workshops, please write a description of the topics to be worked with, a schedule, and information on the workshop leaders. Email these to aimusicstudies2024@kth.se by the date below.

Dates