19 January 2026
On March 26 2026, Prof Oliver Bown will be chairing an evening panel discussion at the Michael Crouch Innovation Centre, UNSW, “AI and Creativity: Design, Fairness, and the Role of Culture in AI’s Future”, with speakers from the UNSW AI Institute, UNSW School of Law, Society and Criminology, the Australian Arts Law Centre, and Canva.
17 January 2026
Oliver Bown will be the presenter at the Creative Industries & Artificial Intelligence Forum, part of the Future of Arts, Culture and Technology Symposium (FACT) at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Feb 13th.
12 December 2025
Professor Christopher Haworth has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for ‘After Sampling Culture: Synthetic media as culture in twenty-first century music’ (SYNCULTURE). This 5-year project explores the concept/metaphor of ‘synthesis’ as it has arisen in generative AI discourse, arguing that music, through its 60+ years of engagement with synthetic sound, can help better understand its poetics and aesthetics — thus moving us beyond the naive realism of real vs fake/transparent vs opaque that dogs popular debate on these media (‘deepfakes’ etc). With a team of musicologists, practitioners, and engineers, SYNCULTURE will address synthesis in terms of musical practices; discourse and metaphor; theories of representation and modelling; and intellectual property and industry, the aim being to develop a richer understanding of synthesis (both contemporary and historical) as a cultural technique—related to, but distinct from, cultural techniques of sampling and remix that we know all about from twentieth-century media.
26 November 2025
PI Georgina Born has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Lund in Sweden. The citation says:
Professor Georgina Born is one of the world’s most influential and innovative researchers in contemporary musicology and sound studies. Since the mid-1990s, her work has renewed the field by combining musicology, anthropology, sociology and media studies in a groundbreaking way.
Born was the first to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in the domain of art music. Her work established a completely new methodological path for understanding art music as a social practice and challenged old notions of canon and music history.
Throughout her career, Born has consistently renewed and deepened music research through a series of influential studies. Her research has greatly contributed to shaping how musicology is conducted internationally today – not least at Lund University, where her interdisciplinary approach and critical perspective have been crucial to the development of the subject.
Born is an internationally recognized researcher, and has been the principal investigator for two extensive research projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC) for the past fifteen years, one on digital music (2010-15) and one on artificial intelligence and music (2021-2026). Her scientific excellence has been recognized several times, including receiving the 2024 Guido Adler Prize, often called the Nobel Prize of musicology, for her contributions to music research.
“Georgina Born’s research work has been crucial for the renewal of musicology and her successes within the ERC are an inspiration to all researchers at our faculty,” says Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. “Appointing her an honorary doctorate is a way for us to recognize and reward an academic pioneer.”
22 November 2025
Associate Professor Oliver Bown will join other members of the Creative Technologies Research Lab, Professor Anna Munster, Dr Thomas Smith and PhD candidate Chloe McFadden with a line up of some of the world’s leading artists working with and exploring the theme of AI, to give short talks at an “In Dialogue” event supporting the launch of the MCA exhibition “Data Dreams”. The event will be on Saturday, 22nd November at the MCA. It will be hosted by Benjamin Law, and will feature artists and thinkers Lamia Dabboussy, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Fabien Giraud and Agnieszka Kurant, Angie Abdilla and Christopher Kulendran Thomas.
31 October 2025
Between November 4 to 6 2025, Owen Green and Georgina Born will participate in a 3 day workshop led by team member Bob Sturm and held at KTH, Stockholm, with the aim of debating whether there is a need for a manifesto responding to the significant challenges posed by the application of AI to music, art and everything else. Questions to be addressed include: What are the personal and professional incentives to train as a musician or composer in a world where anyone can create commercial-quality popular music simply by feeding textual descriptions to AI music generation platforms? How can a human music creator compete in a marketplace inundated with music of the AI-generated sort? How can public policy incentivize music training and safeguard the art form? And does AI and its application really “democratize creativity”?
31 October 2025
Upcoming Panel on AI at CMMR 2025
Artemi Maria-Gioti and Rebecca Fiebrink will be speaking on a CMMR panel on AI, joined by Tommie Introna, next week on Tuesday, 5 November, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at UCL’s Pool Street Cinema.
More information about the panel
31 October 2025
Associate Professor Oliver Bown and his collaborators have been awarded two Discovery Project Grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
Artists and Generative-AI: Copyright and Private Regulation of Creativity
Chief Investigators: Prof Kathryn Bowrey, A/Prof Oliver Bown, Dr Marie Hadley
Partner Investigator: Dr Louise Buckingham
Abstract: There is a significant power imbalance between artists and tech giants in the age of Generative AI and undermining of the value of copyright to creators. This project investigates the connection between licensing terms attached to the digital tools, apps, and platforms used by visual artists and intensification of economic and cultural disruption in the arts. Project innovation flows from mapping artist’s views about their incorporation into AI-data markets to tech and platform licensing terms that facilitate extraction of value from creative labour. Recommendations will help promote more equitable industry-artist partnerships to facilitate growth of a vibrant digital arts sector through improving education and legal advice to artists.
From Noise to Signal: Improving Sonic Experiences in the Gallery
Chief Investigators: A/Prof Caleb Kelly, A/Prof Oliver Bown, A/Prof Lawrence Harvey, Dr Pia van Gelder
Partner Investigator: A/Prof Adel-Jing Wang
Abstract: The project will investigate how sound works are installed within art exhibitions in the increasingly noisy art museum and gallery sector. It combines cross-cultural curatorial research with visitor experience testing using emerging technologies for non-intrusive surveying to better understand the significance of sound on the visitor experience. Expected outcomes include strategies to transform institutional paradigms concerning sound, improved experiences for the public within art institutions and potential benefits for the future development of analogous public spaces. The project will contribute tangible cultural benefits for Australian cultural sector by providing actionable recommendations to enhance exhibition environments.
31 October 2025
Between October 27 and 28 2025, Georgina Born and Aaron Einbond participated in research workshops held at IRCAM, Paris, under the direction of Carmine-Emanuele Cella on broad questions of music and AI, and on the future of the orchestra. The workshops will continue over the coming years. They are intended to forge a new community of thought and creative practice around these key themes, as well as a new organisational structure to support this at IRCAM. In future meetings, MusAI’s Artemi-Maria Gioti will also participate, in addition to Georgina and Aaron.
20 October 2025
Rebecca Fiebrink will be speaking at the KIKK festival in Namur, Belgium next week on “Data as Dialogue: Beyond Ground Truth in Creative ML”
Date: 24 October 2025
Time: 3.30-4.10 pm (WET)
For more information and tickets
11 October 2025
Eric Drott gave a talk on October 3 at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, titled “Music and the Aesthetics of the Asset Form.”
4 October 2025
On September 16, Eric Drott gave an invited talk at the RTF Media Colloquium series at the University of Texas, titled “Streaming, Sleep, and the Crises of Social Reproduction”
29 September 2025
On 17th October, Oliver Bown is running his webinar “Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries.” The webinar will run from 10 am to 1 pm AEST (Sydney)
28 August 2025
Today, on 28th of August, Oliver Bown talked about Creative AI at a meeting of the Korea Foundation in Sydney.
22 August 2025
Oliver Bown, together with Sue Keay, Director of the UNSW AI Institute, contributed a submission to Australia’s Economic Roundtable, arguing that loosening copyright protections is not necessary to foster innovation.
18 August 2025
Between Nov 14-18, Christopher Haworth is joining Audio Ghosts as a guest artist. Audio Ghosts is a research project exploring how ‘artistic interpretation of auditory illusions can contribute to both the artistic and scientific understanding of sound installation art’
11 August 2025
Read Oliver Bown‘s new essay ‘Predicting Culture‘ in Mosaic published on 29 July 2025. This essay focuses on AI’s growing influence on creativity and cultural production needs human-centred strategies to ensure diverse and equitable cultural futures.
12 July 2025
On 10 July Rebecca Fiebrink gave a keynote at xCOAx 2025 (13th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X) titled ‘Thinking Differently About “Data” in Creative and Interactive Machine Learning’ in Creative and Interactive Machine Learning.’
10 July 2025
In 12 June 2025, Rebecca Fiebrink led a workshop at the Sonar 2025 Festival attended by over 100 participants, titled “Design your dream music AI tool”, motivated and informed by critical perspectives on music AI explored in the MusAI project. The workshop aimed to encourage participants to think of different ways and genres to work with music and AI.
Fiebrink also spoke on a panel on AI and music.
1 July 2025
On 25 May, Artemi-Maria Gioti was invited to give a talk titled ‘Ethnography of a Data-making Practice’ at Zukunftstage II, held at Anton Bruckner University in Linz.
30 June 2025
First Pedagogical Experiments in Work Package 5
The MusAI programme has now entered its final phase, with the project (WP5) ‘Prototyping Radically Interdisciplinary Music AI Pedagogies‘ led by Georgina Born (UCL) and Rebecca Fiebrink (UAL), supported by Jon Gillick, Owen Green, and the rest of MusAI’s contributing researchers. This project translates the research findings of the earlier MusAI projects into new critical and interdisciplinary pedagogies; the courses are aimed both at students working at the intersections of music and AI, and at computer science and engineering students wanting to gain a broad interdisciplinary background in critical AI studies, via music and cultural industries, to inform their future professional work.
To develop these pedagogies the team developed and delivered two curriculums, each spanning eight weekly sessions and targeting different cohorts. Both courses were delivered, in parallel, between mid-April and mid-June 2025. The first of these was a PhD-level seminar, generously hosted by the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London, and drew in 25 PhD researchers from diverse disciplines, working between music and AI. The second took the form of an intervention into an extant masters-level course in machine learning for students in Creative Computing at the University of the Arts London’s Creative Computing Institute (CCI).
Both courses had a broadly similar format, featuring weekly lectures from across the pool of MusAI’s researchers on a particular topic related to their MusAI projects, bookended by introductory and summative sessions by Georgina Born and Owen Green. Topics included:
- AI and decolonisation (Darci Sprengel)
- Critical creative applications of AI (Artemi-Maria Gioti and Aaron Einbond)
- Artistic critiques of AI as historical interventions (Christopher Haworth)
- The political economy of AI, innovation and copyright (Eric Drott and Oliver Bown)
- Redesigning recommender systems and public good AI (Fernando Diaz, Georgina Born and Jerome Ramos)
- Genre, computational modelling, and the limits of MIR (Owen Green)
The ordering, framing and exact format necessarily differed. For the PhD seminar at C4DM, sessions took the form of an opening presentation by that week’s host, focusing on their MusAI work, followed by group discussion between the twenty or so participants. At CCI, the master’s group was much larger and not focused on music. Sessions here used online tools like Figma to facilitate sharing critical responses to the guest lectures, but were also distinctive for being combined with the students’ first introduction to the computational techniques of machine learning.
Each of these courses asked their participants for feedback via a survey, and invited follow-up in the form of interviews and focus-groups to feed into future iterations of the course to be delivered as the project continues into 2026. Our profound gratitude to everyone who took part and helped to make this a really stimulating eight weeks for the researchers and the student participants. Particularly warm thanks to our hosts at the C4DM, Queen Mary, and at UAL.
10 June 2025
Oliver Bown is organising a workshop at NIME 2025, titled “Global Entanglements, Music, and the Commodification of Cultural Labour in the Age of AI,” taking place in June 2025.
This three-hour workshop aims to explore contemporary entanglements in the music sector—spanning social, corporate, technological, and political dimensions—as well as the commodification of cultural labour.
Join the conversation and read more about the workshop:
10 June 2025
The OECD recently published a series of AI Capability Scales to help understand AI’s current capabilities in a set of identified domains and to help project how those capabilities might develop in the near future. The scales have recently been published. Oliver Bown performed as a reviewer on the OECD AI Creativity Scale.
5 June 2025
Oliver Bown will be talking at two events hosted by Inner West Council, Sydney.
- “Art & AI: Where’s It Going?” Public lecture. Marrickville Library. 25th of June, 6.30pm. Register here
- Inner West Creative Toolbox symposium. “Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries”, workshop. 30th of June. Register here
5 June 2025
Oliver Bown is finishing up a visit to London where he has been presenting guest lectures to PhD students at Queen Mary, University of London (which hosts a 70-strong PhD program in Music and AI) and to master’s students at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London. These were presented along with MusAI team, covering critical discussion of the Music AI startup sector and current copyright debates.
30 May 2025
Call for papers!
MusAI researcher Christopher Haworth is on the scientific committee of the International Conference “Music and Machines” which will explore how musical creation, performance and listening are affected by computational thinking and new technologies.
The Accademia Musicale Chigiana (Siena, Italy) and “Chigiana. Journal of Musicological Studies” are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the International Conference “Music and Machines,” to be held in Siena from December 4 to 6, 2025.
The International Conference “Music and Machines explores how music, computational thinking, and new technologies have reshaped musical creation, performance, and listening throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The primary focus is on contemporary music, but the conference also invites critical perspectives on how emerging technologies may inform the study of historical musical practices.
The official languages of the conference are English and Italian.
Proposal deadline: June 30, 2025
For full details and submission guidelines, please visit: https://www.journal.chigiana.org/call-chigiana-conference-2025/
30 May 2025
Next week! Join SPARC 2025 between 4th and 8th June, curated by a MusAI researcher, Aaron Einbond, as part of City St George’s, University of London. SPARC is a free public event bringing sound practice and research with people, with concerts, talks, workshops and a soundwalk.
Register for events separately from the schedule below: www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve…
Photo credit: Claudia Molitor and the ‘Rewilding Music’ project
30 May 2025
Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Computer Music Journal
Title: New Perspectives on Models for Critical and Creative Sound Practice
Editors: Christopher Haworth (c.p.haworth@bham.ac.uk) and Erik Nyström (Erik.Nystrom@citystgeorges.ac.uk)
Please contact the editors for submissions or any enquiries.
Manuscript submission deadline: 12 January 2026
Models can be miniatures, proxies, abstractions, idealisations, theories, and stand-ins for reality (Frigg 2022). At once theoretical and applied, descriptive and predictive, small and large scale, understanding how models both represent and intervene in reality is a growing priority for scholars making sense of power, politics, and selfhood in our increasingly datafied worlds (Weisberg 2012; Mackenzie 2017; Downey & Paglen 2024). Models have always been a matter of concern for computer musicians, and they cross almost all its domains—sound synthesis, gesture recognition, spatialization, interactive systems, acoustic and perceptual theory. In the twenty-first century, models can appear in areas so broad and ubiquitous as to pass for the ground truth about sound—as with Fourier models (Kromhout 2021, Mills 2022)—and so local and particular as to question the world-model distinction on which they rely—as with the highly-individualised clones and mimics enabled by machine learning-driven signal processing (Mackenzie 2017). To the extent that we ‘know’ modelling in computer music, it tends to be on the disciplinary terms of mathematics and engineering. Here, the desire for realistic simulation—whether of instruments, voices, spaces, performance gestures—is often intrinsically tied to rubrics of efficiency, whether that be technological, monetary, or labour-related (Mills 2012, Sterne 2012). Modelling paradigms that depart from realism, and that are driven by non-political economic exigencies—for instance, creative, critical, or speculative approaches—remain marginal.
In the computer music literature, an enduring counter-trend to modelling-as-simulation has been so-called ‘non-standard’ sound synthesis techniques (Holtzman 1978). Associated with composers like Gottfried M Koenig, Herbert Brün, Paul Berg, and Iannis Xenakis, these empirically-guided, experimental models used machine instructions to generate the sequences of samples to be synthesized, such that there was no ‘superordinate acoustic model’ that the resultant sound can be described by (Holtzmann 1994, 244). Such methods have been celebrated for challenging the ‘dualistic’ sound-structure paradigm that prevails in computer music (Di Scipio 1994). Indeed, they equally can be seen as challenging the division of labour between composer and ‘technician-servicer’ (Born 1995, 204). Yet despite association with ‘grassroots resistance’ to ‘the determining logic of technology’ (Dobereiner 2011, 36) the reliance of nonstandard synthesis on literacy in digital signal processing maths has limited its take-up to elites of avant-garde engineer-musicians. Where uses of nonstandard synthesis have departed from this domain, for instance in noise and extreme computer music, the tendency has been to embrace the techniques as sound models rather than as spurs to generate new ones (Haworth 2015).
Contemporary data-driven synthesis and signal decomposition toolboxes like RAVE (Caillon and Esling 2021) and Flucoma (Tremblay et al 2021) reopen the question of creative modelling and its relation to practice. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to talk of a democratisation of advanced computing methods–a shift that has been underdiscussed in terms of its musical implications (Ibid). One implication of this is the new perspective it places on older ideas about creative modelling. In On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart observed that computers allow musicians an unprecedented ability to model sound by specifying sonic invariants through programming, meaning that ‘we are not confined to basing our sound-models on existing physical objects and systems. We may build a model of a technologically (or even physically) impossible object’ (Wishart, 1986, 327). How is this process transformed when a-priori (models) and a-posteriori (listening observation) are brought closer to one another? Or are they in fact driven further away, as some recent practices with hyperreal physical models suggest (Mudd 2024)?
But new thinking on modelling need not only be driven by technological factors. We could equally use this juncture to take stock of work that reassesses the boundary between mathematical-technological models and philosophical-aesthetic ones (De Souza 2024), to better understand the tacit, embodied ways practitioners devise and use models of all kinds in their work, including more speculative, philosophical approaches (Nyström 2018).
In this call we ask: what concepts and terminology are adequate to the situation of computer music in the twenty-first century, when modelling is becoming untethered from specialist disciplines and little of what we encounter in our digital lives is immune to simulation? We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
· Can modelling perform critical functions relative to questions of natural, artificial, and the increasing intertwining of these attributes in the anthropocene?
· What ways of working with models are emerging that are poorly accounted for by existing disciplinary divisions?
· On what bases do practitioners who experiment with models appraise the sonic outcomes?
· Where do contemporary practitioners locate the boundary between devising a model and using one?
· Can the use of particular models carry a politics?
· What theoretical resources do we need to understand modelling in contemporary music – can greater attention to modelling impact canonical analytical paradigms like spectromorphology, or do we need new ones?
· Does AI-driven modelling of sound propose a paradigm that could reframe the dualistic source-transformation creative strategy present in much electroacoustic music practice?
· What impact can a democratisation of advanced computing technology have on creative modelling in sound practice?
· Historical perspectives on models in electroacoustic and computer music
Submissions should follow all CMJ author guidelines (https://direct.mit.edu/comj/pages/submission-guidelines) except that manuscripts should not be submitted online at cmjdb.com. Instead, submissions and queries should be addressed to guest editors Christopher Haworth and Erik Nyström with subject [CMJ | Critical | Models].
References
Born, G., 1995. Rationalizing culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde. Univ of California Press.
De Souza, J. 2024. “Modular Synthesizers as Conceptual Models”. In Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People (eds Teboul, E.J., Kitzmann, A. and Engström, E.) CRC Press.
Di Scipio, A. 1994. “Formal processes of timbre composition challenging the dualistic paradigm of computer music.” Proceedings of ISEA, from Internet: www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/nextgen/j/19.html.
Döbereiner, L., 2011. “Models of constructed sound: Nonstandard synthesis as an aesthetic perspective”. Computer Music Journal, 35(3), pp.28-39.
Downey, A. and Paglen, T., 2024. Trevor Paglen: Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations. Sternberg Press.
Caillon, A. and Esling, P. 2021., ‘RAVE: A variational autoencoder for fast and high-quality neural audio synthesis’, arXiv.org [Preprint]. Available at: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2595779029?pq-origsite=summon&sourcetype=Working%20Papers (Accessed: 13 June 2024).
Frigg, R., 2022. Models and theories: A philosophical inquiry. Taylor & Francis.
Haworth, C., 2015. “Sound synthesis procedures as texts: An ontological politics in electroacoustic and computer music”. Computer Music Journal, 39(1), pp.41-58.
Holtzman, S. R. 1978. “A Description of an Automatic Digital Sound Synthesis Instrument.” DAI research report No. 59. Edinburgh: Department of Artificial Intelligence.
Holtzman, S.R., 1995. Digital mantras: the languages of abstract and virtual worlds. Mit Press.
Kromhout, M.J., 2021. The Logic of Filtering: How Noise Shapes the Sound of Recorded Music. Oxford University Press.
Mackenzie, A., 2017. Machine learners: Archaeology of a data practice. Mit Press.
Mills, M., 2012. “Media and prosthesis: the vocoder, the artificial larynx, and the history of signal processing”. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 21(1), pp.107-149.
Mills, M. 2022. “Everything Is a Filter: George Campbell and the Development of the Electrical Filter in the Bell System (1903-1915).” CCRMA – Stanford University, April 27. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ri9vM5n2iI
Mudd, T., 2024. “Speculative physical modelling synthesis: Personal reflections on making music with the NESS brass and guitar models”. In Procedings of the Speculative Sound Synthesis Symposium 2024.
Nyström, 2018, “Topographic Synthesis: Parameter distribution in spatial texture”, Proceedings of ICMC 2018. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/bbp2372.2018.022/–topographic-synthesis-parameter-distribution-in-spatial?view=image
Sterne, J., 2012. MP3: The meaning of a format. Duke University Press.
Tremblay, P.A., Roma, G. and Green, O., 2021. “Enabling programmatic data mining as musicking: the fluid corpus manipulation toolkit”. Computer Music Journal, 45(2), pp.9-23.
Weisberg, M., 2012. Simulation and similarity: Using models to understand the world. Oxford University Press.
Wishart, T., 1996. On sonic art. Routledge.
20 May 2025
On June 4th at 7 PM, Aaron Einbond will be featured in the SPARC Symposium 2025 at City St George’s, University of London.
The concert will include his piece Prestidigitation, created with the support of the MusAI project.
The full programme for the SPARC Symposium has been updated and can be reached from: www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve…
20 May 2025
This afternoon at 5-6 pm, MusAI’s PI, Georgina Born (Professor of Anthropology and Music, UCL) and Andrew Barry (Professor of Human Geography, UCL) will be giving the first seminar of a mini-series on Interdisciplinarity: New Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. The seminar will discuss the question of interdisciplinarity broadly, while focusing on AI and environmental research.
The seminar is in person, in the Common Ground, Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL, and on Zoom. All welcome!
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropocene/events/2025/may/ai-environment-art
1 May 2025
On June 4th at 7 PM, Aaron Einbond will be featured in the SPARC Symposium 2025 at City St George’s, University of London. The concert will include his piece Prestidigitation, created with the support of the MusAI project.
For full details and to reserve tickets, please visit: SPARC Symposium 2025: Entangle! • City St George’s, University of London
15 April 2025
PI Georgina Born gave the opening keynote address to the annual conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology on Thursday April 3rd at the Faculty of Music, Cambridge University, in the main concert hall. The theme of AI and music ran through the event and was taken up by a number of sessions.
15 April 2025
It is with profound sadness that the MusAI team has learned of the death of our loved, admired, and irreplaceable collaborator, Professor Jonathan Sterne, in late March, following a long and heroic struggle with cancer. As his many colleagues and students will attest, Jonathan was among the most generous and talented thinkers of our times and his astute political and intellectual judgements, advice and contributions will be immensely missed. We send our deep condolences to his partner, Carrie Rentschler, and his family and students.
10 April 2025
PI Georgina Born will be giving a paper at the AlgoSoc conference in Amsterdam on April 10-12th 2025. The paper summarises the second stage of WP4b, ‘Interdisciplinary Interventions in the Design of Music Recommender Systems’, which has taken the form of a sustainedcollaboration with the BBC’s responsible AI data scientists. We have been applying the commonality metric developed in stage one of WP4b to real historical BBC audience data to test out its effects. The paper will be presented in Amsterdam by MusAI researcher Jerome Ramos, our esteemed BBC collaborator, Oliver Elliot, and Georgina, and was co-written with MusAI team member Fernando Diaz.
27 March 2025
Check out Oliver Bown’s article “A win for creative industries against AI?” https://www.artshub.com.au/news/opinions-analysis/a-win-for-creative-industries-against-ai-2769396/
27 March 2025
PI Georgina Born is giving the opening keynote at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology annual conference, titled ‘Musical Futures’, to be held at Cambridge University on Thursday April 3rd from 5.45 to 7pm, at the Faculty of Music. Her keynote lecture is titled ‘Music and AI Futures’, and the abstract follows:
Our conference theme, ‘Musical futures’, enjoins us to ask what kinds of futures musicians and music scholars today are imagining, building or rejecting. One subtheme takes us to artificial intelligence and the question of how generative AI is shaping music-making and music studies, now and in the future. This is my focus given that for several years I’ve been directing a research programme, ‘MusAI’, that critically probes AI’s impact on music. In my keynote I reflect on this work and its fruits. MusAI has involved a sustained experiment in a still-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. I will relate my own experience of these encounters as a version of collaborative ethnography, but I prefer to think of them as a form of agonistic interdisciplinarity in which there is a mutual drive to transcend given disciplinary coordinates. This has necessarily also involved ‘co-criticality’, a relationship of mutual openness to critique. In the lecture I reflect first on the ethnographic experience of working with engineers and others whose orientation is relentlessly towards crafting particular kinds of sociotechnical future for music. An obvious finding is that not all music scholars 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 studies. I then convey some findings from the MusAI work, notably certain lacunae characterising AI music. I ask: what can be learned from collaborative ethnography 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 to the limit? And when artistic and humanistic approaches to music are threatened with eclipse by the STEM music disciplines?
26 March 2025
The ACMI Symposium Future Music, Music Futures, featuring Oliver Bown and other leading voices in music and technology, is now accessible online! This symposium explores the intersections of AI, creativity, and the evolving landscape of music and now accessible online via this link: https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/future-music-music-futures-fact-2025-symposium/
LinkImage source: ACMI
18 February 2025
We are pleased to announce that the two-day British Academy conference Audiences, Publics, Experience: Rethinking Music Reception will take place on Thursday 6th and Friday 7th March 2025 at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL, London.
This two-day British Academy conference showcases interdisciplinary thinking on the reception of music and sound.
Drawing together musicology, anthropology, psychology, sound, media, and cultural studies, the conference aims to progress foundational research on music reception today, deepen our understanding of musical experience, and establish a new interdisciplinary framework.
The conference keynote will be given by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier of Tulane University, USA
This two-day conference is funded by the British Academy with the support of UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies.
A programme for this two-day conference will be added closer to date. Please feel free to check the list of speakers by this link: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/british-academy-conferences/audiences-publics-experience/
Conference convenors:
Professor Georgina Born FBA, University College London
Dr Joseph Browning, City University of London
Dr Christabel Stirling, Royal College of Music
31 January 2025
Don’t miss out on Oliver Bown‘s talk “Commercial Generative Music: A Practice-Based Study of AI Music Production” where he summarizes his work from the MusAI Research Programme at ACMI’s Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2025)
FACT is an annual event held in partnership with Major Event Partner Creative Australia. The 2025 symposium will explore the future of media, art, and culture, with a focus on how infrastructures shape these fields.
See ticket options via this link: https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/fact-2025/#tickets
17 January 2025
On February 19, at 1 pm, Christopher Haworth will give a seminar on ‘AI Winters, Cybernetic Springs: Species of AI Critique in the work of Maryanne Amacher and David Tudor‘ to SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music at Queen’s University Belfast
17 January 2025
On January 29 at 5pm, PI Georgina Born will present a paper to the Colloquium of the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, in the Robin Orr Recital Room of the Faculty’s West Road location. The paper is titled ‘Music’s Challenges to AI Studies: Founding a New Field?’.
17 January 2025
Oliver Bown‘s paper ‘From genies performing magic to sages imparting wisdom: a value-centred survey of music AI user interfaces, creative affordances and artist objectives‘ from Journal of New Music Research (JNMR) is out. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09298215.2024.2442360
17 January 2025
From January 5 to 9, 2025, PI Georgina Born participated with her co-organisers Asia Biega (MPI-SP Bochum, DE), Mary L. Gray (Microsoft New England R&D Center, Cambridge, USA), Fernando Diaz (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA), and Rida Qadri (Google San Francisco, USA) in the 3 day workshop, ‘Towards a Multidisciplinary Vision for Culturally Inclusive Generative AI’. The workshop was held at the Schloss Dagstuhl conference centre near Trier in Germany. Twenty-eight participants from academia and industry based in the global South and North gathered to discuss a number of themes and challenges in this broad area. Those present spanned the sciences – including computer science, engineering, data science, and natural language processing – and social sciences and humanities – including critical data studies, participatory community development, AI literary studies, histories of AI, and critical AI studies. The group believe this meeting to have hosted an unprecedentedly interdisciplinary and reflexive encounter between all those disciplines focused on generative AI.
27 December 2024
Call for submissions!
The Conference on AI Music Creativity will be held on 10-12 September, in Brussels, Belgium. This annual conference aims to bring the community of people who work on the application of AI in music practice.
The theme of the sixth year of AIMC will be “The Artist in the Loop”.
For more information and deadlines: AIMC 2025
19 December 2024
MusAI team members Georgina Born, Owen Green, Oliver Bown and Eric Drott attended the First International AI Music Studies (AIMS) conference in Stockholm from December 10 to 12. The conference, organised by MusAI team member Prof. Bob Sturm (KTH), intends to find a new interdisciplinary field of AI music studies and was a great success. 60 researchers, musicians, composers and students gathered for three days of excellent talks, presentations, panels and a concert. The opening keynote was given by Professor Born, and MusAI was well represented in the compelling panel on ‘Copyright and After’ in which Oliver Bown and Eric Drott gave papers along with Dr. Anna-Kaisa Kaila (KTH) and Prof. Severine Dusollier, Professor of Intellectual Property in the Law School of Sciences Po Paris and Senior Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France.
The second edition of AIMS will take place in Nottingham, UK, in March 2026.
18 December 2024
Oliver Bown will summarise his work “Commercial Generative Music: A Practice-Based Study of AI Music Production” in the MusAI Research Programme at ACMI’s Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2025)
FACT is a yearly event organised in collaboration with Major Even Partner Creative Australia. In FACT 2025, the symposium will focus on the future of media, art, and culture and how infrastructures shape these fields.
See ticket options via this link: https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/fact-2025/#tickets
22 November 2024
Last Friday, Christopher Haworth was invited to a talk at the “Intangible Modalities Symposium” at the University of Leeds hosted by CePRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts).
https://cepra.leeds.ac.uk/2024/10/04/intangible-modalities-symposium-15-11-24/
16 October 2024
We are pleased to announce the Music Research Seminars 2024-25 hosted by the Department of Performing Arts at City, University of London, including a talk by MusAI project researcher Darci Sprengel. Seminars are open to the public in person and online. Please click on the heading or individual titles below to sign up to attend and receive Zoom links.
Music Research Seminars 2024-25
Wednesdays 17:00-18:30, in-person and online, room AG08, College Building, 280 St. John Street, London EC1V 4PB
Autumn 2024
9 Oct Darci Sprengel “Can AI in the Music Industry Be Decolonised?: Notes from the Arabic Music Industry”
23 Oct (online only) Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta “Researching ‘From the Bottoms Up’: Queer Nightlife, Community Care, and Co-Creative Research Methods”
13 Nov (online only) James Cook “Hearing Historic Scotland: Sound and Acoustics in Virtual Cultural Heritage”
27 Nov
Robert Mitchell “The Illusion of One Hand”
4 Dec
Stephen David Beck “Articulating Space through Granular Immersive Audio”
11 October 2024
Prof. Georgina Born, the PI of MusAI, has been awarded the International Musicological Society’s most prestigious honour, the Guido Adler Prize, for ‘outstanding scholarly achievement in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory’.
https://www.musicology.org/awards-and-programs/ims-gap?id=339
25 September 2024
Don’t miss out on Rebecca Fiebrink‘s talk in the session “What do museums ‘want’? And ‘What does AI need from us?’”. In this event, Rebecca Fiebrink will also be helping her collaborators on the Transforming Collections project run an ML workshop.
Tickets: https://tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/museum-machine-me-conference
18 September 2024
Rebecca Fiebrink is speaking at Tacit Engagement in the Digital Age (TEDA) 2024, “The Magic Machine, Through the Prism of Art and Science” which will be held at the University of Cambridge on Friday 20 September.
13 September 2024
Oliver Bown’s lab, now known as the Creative Technologies Research Lab, has been officially recognized for their invaluable contribution to the design of Australia’s National AI Safety Standard!
Their insightful feedback helped shape this crucial framework for AI safety. You can check out their contribution and learn more about the standards here: AI Safety Standard.
10 September 2024
The Music AI Rights Debate: Beyond the Track and the Training Data
Date & Time: Fri, Oct 18, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM (Sydney)
Venue: ICC Sydney, Room C2.3
Join Oliver Bown for a pivotal discussion on how AI is reshaping music and intellectual property. This discussion outlines a crucial debate on musical culture that requires insights from various angles — legal, creative, social, and technical.
Alongside Bown, experts Kate Haddock, Angela Stengel and Kazjon Grace will address the technical, legal, and cultural aspects of this debate. Discover whether automated attribution could solve or complicate IP issues in music.
Don’t miss this important conversation on the AI music rights!
5 September 2024
On 5 September 2024, Rebecca Fiebrink has given a keynote on “How machine learning can support human creators in music and beyond” at DAFx24 (Digital Audio Effects Conference 2024). Learn more about the conference programme here: https://dafx24.surrey.ac.uk/programme-overview/
21 August 2024
Oliver Bown designed a one day course that provides participants with a comprehensive overview of the changes taking place in the creative industries as a result of AI. Whether your business is pro- or anti-AI, developing, using or competing with AI tools, it is essential to understand the technology, core social issues, and associated trends.
Sign up for announcements here: AI in the Creative Industries Webinar (qrcodes.pro)
21 August 2024
APRA AMCOS REPORT
Oliver Bown was one of 8 experts in AI and music consulted in a major survey by Goldmedia and commissioned by the Australian collection agencies APRA/AMCOS. The report follows up on an earlier report commissioned by GEMMA and SACEM. It details the immediately felt impacts of AI on musicians, as well as their expectations and concerns moving forward. It stresses the ongoing issue of copyright laws and other protections not being fit to protect artists from AI companies using their work for profit. Bown’s contribution also extends to consideration of how music consumption habits will evolve over time, highlighting the dangers of potential “hit song science” type predictive technologies.
The report was published on Friday 17th August.
20 August 2024
Oliver Bown curated a quiz asking people to tell the difference between human and AI created music that will be experienced by attendees at FODI (Festival of Dangerous Ideas) August 24-25.
Here is more information about the festival: https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/
7 August 2024
In Scifest 2024, UNSW Sydney, Oliver Bown will be giving a talk with guest pianist Adrian Lim-Klumpes, “Creative Clash: Human v Machine”. https://www.events.unsw.edu.au/event/scifest-2024-0.
August 16th at the RoundHouse, UNSW Kensington campus.
1 August 2024
Transforming Project, Co-Investigated by Rebecca Fiebrink, will organize a two-day conference “The Museum x Machine x Me” at Tate Modern on 2-3 October 2024. This will take place as part of a public celebration that spans a week and marks the conclusion of a significant research project called “Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation, and Heritage”.
The conference will be followed by a Tate Britain Late event.
Transforming Collections project is a major AHRC-funded project, is a part of “Towards a National Collection (TaNC).” This project successfully merges historical and museological research with machine learning and creative computing disciplines to indicate and amplify marginal and suppressed voices in history.
Tickets are now available via Tate’s website: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/museum-machine-me-conference
20 June 2024
Aaron Einbond will present an invited talk on Monday 24th June at the event “Critical & Creative Digital Dynamics: A Symposium on AI & Digital Innovations for Inter-art Chamber Music Practices” organised in collaboration with the Institute of Languages, Cultures, and Societies (ILCS) at the University of London. The talk “Material Engagement with Machine Learning in Prestidigitation for percussion and 3-D electronics” will examine Aaron’s autoethnographic study of composing with AI from the MusAI project WP3c “Permeable Interdisciplinarity: Algorithmic Composition, Subverted”.
11 June 2024
On June 20, Rebecca Fiebrink will give a talk at Machine Teaching Commons Symposium organized by Critical Media Lab, Basel. For more information see the link: https://criticalmedialab.ch/machine-teaching-commons-teaching-machine-commons/
4 June 2024
Rebecca Fiebrink is set to join the Sonar+D Panel “AI: Generating Panic?” in Barcelona next week on June 13. In this forum, experts will discuss the upcoming realities on AI in arts and culture.
23 May 2024
Tomorrow at the University of Music Trossingen (Germany), from research team Artemi Gioti will give an ML workshop and a guest lecture on “Questions of the Aesthetic in Compositional Applications of ML”
21 May 2024
PI Georgina Born and Advisory Board member Tobias Blanke are now putting together the members of the Editorial Collective and Editorial Board for the new open access journal Cambridge Forum on Artificial Intelligence: Culture and Society, published by Cambridge University Press. The journal will publish the first 4 issues in 2025, and a further 4 issues in 2026. An open call will go out in summer 2024 for proposals for themed issues and Guest Editors to curate them.
21 May 2024
Oliver Bown’s paper has been accepted for Sound and Music Computing 2024 in Porto. Details will be coming later. For more information: https://smcnetwork.org/smc2024/
17 May 2024
Submissions for the 2024 Workshop on the Study of Commercial Creative AI (ComCAI) close today. Co-chaired by Oliver Bown, Rebecca Fiebrink, Georgina Born, and Bob Sturm, the workshop aims to engage the computational creativity community in interdisciplinary discussions. For more information, please visit: https://blogs.unsw.edu.au/iml/workshop-on-the-study-of-commercial-creative-ai-comcai/
15 May 2024
City, University of London announces that PI Professor Georgina Born will give the Worshipful Company of Musicians Annual Lecture on May 15 from 6.30 pm to 7.45 pm BST. Born will present her lecture entitled “Music Transformed: How Digitisation and Artificial Intelligence are Changing Music’” at the Bayes Business School.
During her 45-minute presentation, Georgina Born will discuss her findings as an anthropologist, employing recent research by the MusAI research team, regarding the integration of music into digital media and its growing involvement in advances in artificial intelligence. Her presentation focuses on significant transformations in the nature of music and musical experience, and how they are linked to the commercial and technological strategies driving AI’s development around music.
8 May 2024
Oliver Bown will be talking at LOGIN conference, Vilnius, Lithuania which will be held on May 30-31.
8 May 2024
Oliver Bown has put out a new Conversation piece “AI can now generate entire songs on demand. What does this mean for music as we know it?“. The article analyzes effects of new AI platforms such as Udio and Suno on music cultures and how it analyzes how music cultures. https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-generate-entire-songs-on-demand-what-does-this-mean-for-music-as-we-know-it-228937?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton
1 May 2024
Oliver Bown‘s journal article “Blind search and flexible product visions: the sociotechnical shaping of generative music engines” is published by AI & Society Journal. This article is now open access: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01862-x
Retrieved from the article page
Retrieved from article page
1 May 2024
PI Georgina Born will deliver a keynote at the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group conference, held at Kings College London on July 11-12th.
Posted 30 April 2024
The Editorial Collective and Editorial Board for the new CUP journal, Cambridge Forum on Artificial Intelligence: Culture and Society (AICuSoc), for which PI Georgina Born and Advisory Board member Tobias Blanke are Co-Editors-in-Chief, are now in process of being formed. The first four issues of the journal will be published in 2025.
Posted 30 April 2024
MusAI’s research project ‘WP4b: ‘Interdisciplinary Interventions in the Design of Music Recommender Systems’, led by Fernando Diaz and PI Georgina Born, has now reached a second stage of its work and is entering into research collaborations with two public media organisations: the BBC and Radio Canada in Quebec. The ‘commonality’ metric conceptualised and designed in the project’s first stage will be tested out. WP4b recently published its first stage findings here:
Andreas Ferraro, Gustavo Ferreira, Fernando Diaz and Georgina Born. 2024. ‘Measuring Commonality in Recommendation of Cultural Content to Strengthen Cultural Citizenship’, ACM Transactions of Recommender Systems, 33 (February). https://doi.org/10.1145/3643138
Posted 24 April 2024
On April 19, Artemi Gioti gave a talk at Klangmanifeste in Vienna, about “AI und pataphysics – Art & Philosophy Speed dating & Lecture performances” and answered the questions of arts and science enthusiasts. This session allows experts in the sciences and arts fields to come together and see the parallels between different disciplines. https://www.klangmanifeste.at/index_en.html#SpeedDating
Posted 23 April 2024
On April 16, Artemi-Maria Gioti has performed Bias II by Magda Mayas at the AI Congress of the State of Saxony, Chemnitz.
Posted 22 April 2024
The latest issue of the Computer Music Journal features research from the MusAI team on the cover, in the Sound Anthology, and in two articles. The cover image shows Prestidigitation for percussion and 3D electronics by Aaron Einbond, while it is being workshopped during an artistic research residency at IRCAM supported by MusAI research programme. The work is also featured in the issue’s Sound and Video Anthology along with Bias II for piano and interactive music system by Artemi-Maria Gioti, also created as part of her research for the MusAI project. Inside the issue, both works are the subjects of two major articles by the MusAI team: “Composing the Assemblage: Probing Aesthetic and Technical Dimensions of Artistic Creation with Machine Learning” by Gioti, Einbond, and MusAI PI Georgina Born, and “Embodying Spatial Sound Synthesis with AI in Two Compositions for Instruments and 3-D Electronics” by Einbond et al.
You can find the links to each articles below:
1- Issue page: https://direct.mit.edu/comj/issue/46/4
2- Artemi-Maria Gioti, Aaron Einbond, Georgina Born; Composing the Assemblage: Probing Aesthetic and Technical Dimensions of Artistic Creation with Machine Learning. Computer Music Journal 2022; 46 (4): 62–80. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00658
3- Aaron Einbond, Thibaut Carpentier, Diemo Schwarz, Jean Bresson; Embodying Spatial Sound Synthesis with AI in Two Compositions for Instruments and 3-D Electronics. Computer Music Journal 2022; 46 (4): 43–61. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00664
4- Ken Déguernel, Bob L. T. Sturm, Artemi-Maria Gioti, Georgina Born; Sound and Video Anthology: Program Notes. Computer Music Journal 2022; 46 (4): 112–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_e_00660
5- Ken Déguernel, Bob L. T. Sturm, Artemi-Maria Gioti, Georgina Born, Oded Ben-Tal, Joëlle Léandre, Aaron Einbond, Artemi-Maria Gioti, Iván Paz, Nao Tokui; Sound Anthology: Content. Computer Music Journal 2022; 46 (4): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00661
6- Artemi-Maria Gioti, Aaron Einbond, Georgina Born; Composing the Assemblage: Probing Aesthetic and Technical Dimensions of Artistic Creation with Machine Learning. Computer Music Journal 2022; 46 (4): 62–80. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00658
Posted 22 April 2024
On April 4, Artemi Gioti performed Bias II by Magda Mayas at the annual Conference of the Institute of New Music and Music Education Darmstadt. The performance was followed up with a listening lab on Bias II in collaboration with Magda Mayas.
Posted 21 March 2024
Join Dr. Christopher Haworth as he navigates the intricate landscape of ‘deepfake’ pop music at Hay Festival 2024 at the University of Birmingham. Haworth will delve into the ethical and cultural implications, pondering the future of artistic ownership in the digital age.
For more information: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2024/deepfake-pop-the-legacy-of-civil-war-the-impact-of-terror-attacks-all-at-hay-festival-2024
Posted 21 March 2024
RNCM has shared an informative article on our research team’s visit to Manchester to give two seminars on ongoing research projects as part of our public seminar series in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute. Please read more about it from the link below.
Georgina Born and Owen Green with the PRiSM and RNCM team
Posted 18 March 2024
We are delighted to share that Rebecca Fiebrink is the Co-I on a newly funded project titled “Responsible AI international community to reduce bias in AI music generation and analysis” , funded by the Responsible AI UK International Partnerships scheme (https://www.rai.ac.uk/). Prof. Nick Bryan-Kinns (UAL) is the PI.
This project aims to construct and international community that stresses on the challenges and biases on Responsible AI (RAI) in the terms of music generation and examination.
Please find more information on the newly-launched project website: musicrai.org
Posted 11 March 2024
The First International Conference in AI Music Studies now accepts applications for presentations, panels, and workshops. This year’s theme will be “Prospects, Challenges and Methodologies of Studying AI Music in the Humanities and Social Sciences” and the conference will be held in Dec 10-12, 2024 Stockholm, Sweden.
Abstract
“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 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. The three-day conference will feature papers, panels, workshops, a keynote address, and a concert. The keynote address of the conference will be delivered by Georgina Born (PI of MusAI), Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London.
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.
Important Dates:
– Presentation/Panel/Workshop Submission: March 28 2024
– Decision Notification: April 26 2024
– Early Conference Registration: August 30 2024
– Conference: December 10-12 2024
Other information:
The conference registration fee, and the exact location in Stockholm, have yet to be decided. Please see the conference website for the most current information https://boblsturm.github.io/aimusicstudies2024.
Please send questions or comments to aimusicstudies2024@kth.se.
- Organising Committee
- Bob L. T. Sturm (KTH, Stockholm), chair
- Elin Kanhov (KTH, Stockholm)
- André Holzapfel (KTH, Stockholm)
- Steering Committee
- Toivo Burlin (Stockholm University)
- Jan-Olof Gullö (KMH, Stockholm)
- Hans Lindetorp (KMH, Stockholm)
- Georgina Born (University College London, UK)
- Oded Ben-Tal (Kingston University, UK)’
- Nick Collins (Durham University, UK)
Ken Déguernel (Univ. Lille, CNRS, France) Eric Drott (University of Texas, USA) Thomas Hodgson (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) Jonathan Sterne (University of McGill, Canada) Rujing Stacy Huang (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Ollie Bown (UNSW Sydney, Australia)
Posted 22 February
We are pleased and excited to announce an important new open access journal, co-edited by MusAI’s PI Georgina Born (UCL) and Tobias Blanke (University of Amsterdam), and published by Cambridge University Press, with the first issues in 2025:
Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society will be the first international journal to integrate critical social and cultural studies of AI with digital social science and humanities investigations using AI to analyse social and cultural data. The journal takes up a core challenge of our times: how to make sense of and intervene in our entanglement with the emerging regimes of smart machines in order to both harness their positive potentials and mitigate their harmful effects.
For more details please visit:
https://infogram.com/1tylx20rw79lezieg9798ooppque0k032o9
Posted 21 February 2024
Call for papers: Deadline May 17th
Oliver Bown is leading a workshop on the Study of Commercial Creative AI (ComCAI), which will be held in association with the 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity, a the University of Jönköping, Sweden, 17th-21st June 2024. From our research team, Georgina Born (PI), Rebecca Fiebrink and Bob Sturm will be active in the organising comittee.
The workshop aims to invite computational creativity community to deep dive in interdisciplinary scope in CC with researchers who are new to creative AI, or the CC literature. The workshops calls for contributing statements that will be part of the structured collaborative mapping session, which will either be a full-day or half day event.
For more information: https://blogs.unsw.edu.au/iml/workshop-on-the-study-of-commercial-creative-ai-comcai/
Posted 12 February 2024
Eric Drott’s book ‘Streaming Music, Streaming Capital’ has been recently published by Duke University Press. Link for access:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/streaming-music-streaming-capital
Posted 09 February 2024
Following a sold-out performance in Paris at IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Aaron Einbond’s new composition Prestidigitation II for Ensemble L’Instant Donné and 3D electronics will be broadcast by Radio France on February 14th at 8 pm CET alongside works by Gabriella Smith and Steve Reich performed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The broadcast will include a binaural rendering of the concert’s immersive electronics, so high-definition headphones are recommended. The new composition builds on Prestidigitation for percussion and 3D electronics, produced in 2022 with support from MusAI. Both works stem from Aaron’s MusAI research project “Permeable Interdisciplinarity: Algorithmic Composition, Subverted”.
Posted 31 January 2024
Georgina Born and Owen Green will present at the research forum of https://www.rncm.ac.uk/, where they will introduce the MusAI programme and initial work on their Sonic Social Genre project. Join live stream on February 7, 4.15 pm GMT.
Posted 23 January 2024
From mid January to March 1st, the MusAI research programme (based at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies and UCL Anthropology) is collaborating with the ‘AI and the Arts’ group at The Alan Turing Institute on the delivery of four public seminars emerging from its research. MusAI is the ERC-funded programme “Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies”, the first major research initiative to address the implications of AI for culture. It takes music as the medium through which to create a field of critical studies indicative of AI’s wider influence on culture, bringing together the social sciences and humanities, creative practice, computer science and engineering.
Link
Here are the links for seminars 2, 3 and 4:
Seminar 2
Date: 6 Feb, 4.30 pm
Title: Music and Copyright after Generative AI: Social, Ontological and Legal Perspectives
hosted by Inspace, Institute of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Presenters:
*Georgina Born (UCL)
*Eric Drott (University of Texas)
*Christopher Haworth (University of Birmingham).
**Featuring an electronic music performance by Owen Green (Max Planck Institute) and Jules Rawlinson (University of Edinburgh).
Seminar 3
Date: 23 Feb, 3.30 pm
Title: AI and Practice-Based Research in Music and the Arts
hosted by PRiSM, Royal Northern College of Music & Manchester University
Presenters:
*Aaron Einbond (City University, London)
Seminar 4
Date: 1 March, 3 pm
Title: Towards Radically Interdisciplinary AI Pedagogies
hosted by The Alan Turing Institute, London
Presenters:
*Rebecca Fiebrink (University of Arts, London)
*Owen Green (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; UCL)
*Oliver Bown (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
*Georgina Born (UCL)
The seminar is free and open to the public, both in person and via Zoom. Registration is essential. Please join us for what promises to be a lively series of seminars, with considerable space for discussion and networking. A short description of each of the seminars follows.
Posted 12 January 2024
Generative AI is disrupting various industries, but we don’t know much about how it will affect the economies of extremely crowded markets. Check out one of our researchers Oliver Bown‘s article at 360:
Posted 12 December 2023
On 15 December 2023, Artemi-Maria Gioti will deliver a keynote with the title “Deconstructing data: the compositional process as critical inquiry” at the online symposium “AI in Music – Agency, Performance, Production and Perception”, organised by the University of Music Trossingen.
12 December 2023
On 9 December 2023, one of our core researchers, Artemi-Maria Gioti gave a talk with the title “Artistic research as technological critique in Bias II for piano and interactive music system” at the Symposium “Artistic and Artificial? – Aktuelle Perspektiven auf künstliche Intelligenz und Musik” organised by DEGEM (German Association of Electroacoustic Music) in Lübeck.
12 December 2023
Call for papers for the first International Conference in AI Music Studies
December 10-12, 2024 | Stockholm, Sweden | KTH in the Snow
We are thrilled to announce the inaugural International Conference in AI Music Studies, set to take place from December 10-12, 2024, at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden. This event will delve into the “Prospects, Challenges, and Methodologies of Studying AI Music in the Humanities”.
Professor Georgina Born, PI of MusAI project will be the keynote speaker in this conference.
Call for Papers
Scholars across various domains, including music computing, musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, ethics, economics, feminist, and posthumanist studies, are encouraged to submit abstracts for consideration. Selected authors will have the opportunity to present and discuss their full papers during the conference.
Organizing Committee and Steering Committee
The conference is organized by a dedicated committee, with Bob L. T. Sturm (KTH, Stockholm, part of MusAI research) serving as the chair.
We look forward to your participation in this groundbreaking exploration of AI Music within the Humanities.
5 December 2023
At ICMC 2023 in Shenzhen, China, Christopher Haworth won the best paper award together with Esteban Gutierrez and Rodrigo Cadiz.
Their project is based on auditory distortion products used in musical sound synthesis, working on the creation of ‘phantom’ tones which is only hearable for the listener of the auditory distortion products. Learn more about the project.
5 December 2023
One of our core researchers, Christopher Haworth was the featured composer at Sound Junction Main Programme at the University of Sheffield on December 2.
24 November 2023
PI Georgina Born is giving a keynote lecture at an international symposium on ‘Interdisciplining Knowledge: Humanities, Science and Culture’ at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal, on Dec 6, 2023. The title is ‘Are there limits? Interdisciplinarities among the social sciences and humanities – and beyond’.
24 November 2023
Join the hybrid book launch and discussion of “Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology” on Tuesday, November 28 at 4 PM at Royal Anthropological Institute. The event will be hosted by PI Georgina Born, and Gavin Williams will participate in the discussion.
29 September 2023
The MusAI Iklektic performance videos have been uploaded to our new YouTube channel.
29 November 2022
Prepared piano, handmade percussion, new compositions, and electronic improvisations situate AI with the listener in a unique 3D sound environment. With the explosion in music technologies offering artificial intelligence, artists and musicians are exploring original and meaningful ways to adapt them to creative ends — often in ways that critique their underlying assumptions. Live performances explore themes of agency and performative creativity to find new ways to control spatial sound, compose algorithmic patterns, and respond to bodily gesture. The performances will be followed by open Q & A and discussion with the artists.
