Music and AI Futures: For an Urgent and Radical Interdisciplinarity

How is artificial intelligence shaping music-making, and what are its implications for musicology and music studies?

Presented in collaboration with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (Faculty of Fine Arts and Music) and the Grainger Museum (Department of Museums and Collections).

How is artificial intelligence shaping music-making, and what are its implications for musicology and music studies? For several years, Professor Georgina Born has been directing a research programme, ‘MusAI’, that takes music as a lens through which to critically probe AI’s impact on culture.

In her lecture, she reflects on this work and its fruits. MusAI has involved a sustained experiment in a rare, radical kind of interdisciplinarity between, on the one hand, music researchers from the arts, humanities and social sciences and, on the other, those from engineering, computer science and data science. Professor Georgina Born will relate her experience of these encounters as a form of agonistic interdisciplinarity in which there is a mutual drive to transcend existing disciplinary coordinates and cultivate an openness to critique.

Through the case of our work designing an ‘alternative’ music recommender system, Professor Georgina Born reflects on the experience of working with scientists whose orientation is towards crafting particular kinds of sociotechnical future for music, by way of projecting certain kinds of musical subjectivity. An obvious finding is that not all music researchers today have equivalent authority and power; increasingly, there is a hierarchy of knowledges between the disciplines researching music, and in our straitened times, this is reshaping academic music. She then conveys additional findings from the MusAI work, notably certain lacunae characterising AI music studies. What can be learned from our interdisciplinary work, at the limits of mutual comprehension, when rapid and profound transformations of music are at stake? When our capacity to understand, control and change these directions are tested in unprecedented ways? And when humanistic approaches to music are threatened with eclipse by the STEM music disciplines?

The AI at Melbourne Colloquium Series is a program of talks on the future of artificial intelligence at The University of Melbourne.

This event is co-hosted by AI at Melbourne, Melbourne Connect, and CIS Doctoral Colloquium.

About the Speaker

Professor Georgina Born

Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London (UCL).

Georgina Born (OBE, FBA) is a British anthropologist, musicologist, and former professional musician, and is Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London (UCL). Her research spans music, sound, media, digital culture, and artificial intelligence, with a strong emphasis on ethnographic methods and the study of cultural production. She has previously held professorial posts at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has been a visiting professor at institutions including UC Berkeley, McGill, Princeton, and the University of Oslo. Born’s influential books include Rationalizing Culture, Western Music and Its Others, and Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2016 for services to anthropology, musicology, and higher education, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2014. Born is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded five-year research programme Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (MusAI), which critically investigates the cultural, aesthetic, ethical, legal, and social implications of AI in music.