NEW MUSICAL TURMOILS: MUSIC, AI, AND MATERIAL FUTURES

Georgina Born, Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology and Music, University College London

In the context of today’s geopolitical turmoil, our conference theme, ‘Music in Socio-Cultural Turmoil’, enjoins us to ask what kinds of futures musicians and music scholars today are imagining, building or rejecting. In this presentation, I draw on my current research on music and artificial intelligence to consider the question of how generative AI is shaping music-making and music studies, now and for the future. This is a particular kind of turmoil: one shaped by combined forces of capital, technology, and the subjectivities they call into being. For several years I’ve been directing a research programme, ‘MusAI’, that critically probes AI’s impact on music. In my lecture I draw on this work and its fruits. MusAI has involved a sustained experiment in a ‘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. This demands an agonistic interdisciplinarity in which there is a mutual drive to transcend given disciplinary coordinates. I reflect first on the experience of working with engineers and others whose orientation is relentlessly towards crafting particular kinds of socio-technical future for music. An obvious finding is that not all music research today has equivalent authority and power; increasingly, there is a hierarchy of knowledges between the disciplines researching music, and this is reshaping academic music studies. I then present some core findings of the MusAI research, focusing on certain lacunae characterising AI music. I point in particular to the way that AI music and art have become hosts for teleological accounts of technical evolution that espouse the inevitable and beneficial development of AI systems while marginalising questions of aesthetics and musical value, developments occluded by two proxies: ideological notions of creativity and democratization. In the final section I address the ontology of the music ushered in by AI and its aesthetic implications, disentangling three dimensions of ontological change, the most elusive of which turns on a drastic transformation of sonic materials in comparison with previous forms of digitized music. I suggest that the data-ified sonic materials fed into generative AI can be conceptualised as an ‘aggregate’, one that favours the dissolution of authorship and of the integrity of individual works, and the destruction of copyright. Together, these profound ontological shifts both participate in and are prophetic of the wider socio-cultural turmoil being unleashed by AI: music, once again, becomes a harbinger of the coming society. ‘Music is prophecy. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things’ (Attali).

For the MusAI research programme see: https://musicairesearch.wordpress.com

Biography

Georgina Born is Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London. From 2010-21 she was Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford, and from 2006-10 Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at the University of Cambridge. Earlier, she had a professional life as a musician in experimental rock, jazz and improvised music. She has held visiting professorships as follows: Bloch Professor, UC Berkeley Department of Music (2014); Schulich Distinguished Professor in Music, McGill University (2015); Visiting Professor in the Schools of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine (2019-20, 2023-24); Professor II, University of Oslo, Department of Musicology (2014-19); Senior Research Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2018-19); and Global Scholar, Department of Music, Princeton University (2020-22). She has led two ERC research grants on music, digitisation and AI. She was awarded a Fellowship of the British Academy (2014), an OBE ‘for services to anthropology, musicology and higher education’ (2016), and the Guido Adler Prize of the International Musicological Society (2024).