Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is an especially disruptive technology, impacting a growing number of domains in ways both beneficial and detrimental. It is even showing surprising impacts in the Arts, provoking questions fundamental to philosophy, law, and engineering, not to mention practices in the Arts themselves. MUSAiC is an interdisciplinary research venture confronting questions and challenges at the frontier of the AI disruption of music. It aims to analyze, criticize and fundamentally broaden the AI transformation of three interrelated music practices: 1) listening, 2) composition and performance, and 3) analysis and criticism. For each practice, and grounded in two specific music traditions (Irish and Swedish), MUSAiC will document and critically analyze the impacts of and ethical issues surrounding AI. MUSAiC will formulate and implement the first music pedagogy for AI, the lack of which continues to result in the creation of AI systems that have only a surface knowledge of music. From this pedagogy, MUSAiC will develop new holistic methods for understanding and benchmarking AI, and improving them and their application. It will implement and test novel AI systems that dynamically adapt to specific users as “digital apprentices”, thus bringing human-AI music partnerships to new levels of fruitfulness. The outcomes of MUSAiC will facilitate applications of AI to music in robust and responsible ways, impacting a wide variety of stakeholders. It will not only prepare music practitioners and audiences of the present (human and artificial) for new ways of listening, working, appraising, and developing the art form, but will also pave the way for analyzing, criticizing and broadening the AI transformation of the other Arts. The PI, a leading figure in music AI and music informatics, is employed at a world-leading research department at the top-rated technical university in Sweden. He is also a composer, frequently illustrating his research outcomes through music.