Music and Artificial Intelligence: Pasts and Futures, Opportunities and Risks

Music and Artificial Intelligence: Pasts and Futures, Opportunities and Risks

May 28 2019, Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Aarhus University

Given escalating public concerns over the implications of Artificial Intelligence, this conference probes AI’s cultural implications through the enduring relationship between music and AI – evident in the influence of cybernetics on music, in Marvin Minsky’s work at MIT, and recently in the burgeoning field of Music Information Retrieval. Speakers will probe the risks and opportunities associated with music recommendation algorithms, automated genre mapping tools, emotion recognition systems, and machine learning-based creative tools. Issues are likely to include automating musical creativity, biases in recommendation algorithms, the long-term cultural effects of AI in music, and the desirability of transparency and accountability. If, as Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler put it, ‘the new gold rush in the context of AI is to enclose different fields of human knowing, feeling and action, in order to capture and privatize those fields’, then how is music inflected by these imperatives, what might be done to alter them, and what musical futures will result?

http://aias.au.dk/events/aiasconference-musicandartificialintelligence/

Speakers include: Jonathan Sterne(McGill), Eric Drott (U. of Texas, Austin), Nick Seaver (Tufts U.), Rebecca Fiebrink (Goldsmiths), Chris Haworth (Birmingham), Aaron Einbond (City U.), and Fernando Diaz (Microsoft Research, previously director of research at Spotify). The organiser is Georgina Born (Aarhus and Oxford).

Benga (a Kenyan Kaleidoscope)

I wanted to announce you the release of our association’s new publication, articulated as a multidisciplinary collection of essays on Benga music, a Kenyan music genre, and various questions related to its current modern-day re-interpretation in the digital era. Edited in English and French, the publication includes essays by Scholars and artists such as:

Andrew Eisenberg (Professor NYU (Abu Dhabi))
Jehanne Dennogent (University of Lausanne)
Gregg Tendwa (Kenyan cross-medial artist, producer at Santuri Safari/Bengatronics)
Mbithi Masya (Film Director and founder of Just a Band)
Flexfab (Swiss Electronic Music producer)
KMRU (Kenyan Electronic Music producer)
U-Zehn (Swiss graphic artists)
Mathias Nagy (Ivorian-Swiss music label Nouchy Arts)
Shake it Maschine (Swiss Electronic Music Producer)
And others
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21st Century Music Practice series of Elements by Cambridge University Press

I am very pleased to announce the launch of the 21st Century Music Practice series of Elements by Cambridge University Press. Elements are a new publishing format that CUP are promoting that consists of a 20,000 word text – somewhere in between a standard journal article and a book – and which can also involve extensive multi-media content. The series has developed out of the 21st Century Music Practice Research Network which currently has around 250 members in 30 countries and is dedicated to the study of what Christopher Small termed Musicking – the process of making and sharing music rather than the output itself. Obviously this exists at the intersection of ethnomusicology, performance studies, and practice pedagogy / practice-led-research in composition, performance, recording, production, musical theatre, music for screen and other forms of multi-media musicking. The generic nature of the term ‘21st Century Music Practice’ reflects the aim of the series to bring together all forms of music into a larger discussion of current practice and to provide a platform for research about any musical tradition or style. It embraces everything from hip hop to historically informed performance and K-Pop to Inuk Throat Singing.
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COST Action: Cultural Victimology (incl. pop music)

Dear colleagues,

Together with a few colleagues at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and beyond, I have drafted a COST Action proposal, which has recently be granted. COST Action is meant to build up and maintain a network of researchers, living and working in the EU, regarding a specific research area. The COST Action I’m part of is about Cultural Victimology.
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Cuadernos de Etnomusicologia (new issue)

Dear IASPMites,

The latest edition of the journal Cuadernos de Etnomusicologia is now published and may be accessed online: https://www.sibetrans.com/etno/cuaderno/30/cuadernos-de-etnomusicologia-n-12

It includes a special issue about music scenes, which discusses its conceptual and methodological development while providing further case studies within Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

Feel free to share with any colleagues that might be interested.

cfp: New Zealand Musicological Society 2019 Annual Conference

CFP: New Zealand Musicological Society 2019 Annual Conference, 29 Nov – 1 Dec 2019, Auckland, NZ

CALL FOR PAPERS
2019 Annual Meeting of the New Zealand Musicological Society: ‘Musical Intersections’

29 November to 1 December, 2019
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Deadline for proposals is 1 August 2019
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cfp: “Our music, our world: wind bands and local social life”

Reminder: “Our music, our world: wind bands and local social life”

Deadline for submissions: May 30th, 2019

More info below (https://anossamusica.web.ua.pt/conferencia.php)

Our music, our world: wind bands and local social life

International conference
October 10th-12th, 2019

Hosted and organized by the University of Aveiro and INET-md (Portugal) and co-organized by the International Society for the Promotion and Research of Wind Music (IGEB)

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