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).