Music’s Challenges to AI Studies: Founding a New Field? (Professor Georgina Born OBE FBA, University College London)

A new kind of music studies is needed to analyse the influence of artificial intelligence on music. Yet music also changes how we think about AI. In this paper I take three angles on the challenges posed by AI to music and music to AI. I follow media theory in breaking down the communicative process into three analytical moments: creation or production; curation and reception; and the object itself, AI-mediated music. A key dimension of life put on the agenda by AI music is aesthetics: aesthetics as a feature of musical creativity that comes immanently to be vested in the musical object – work, track or ‘song’; and aesthetics as a quality of music reception. Indeed, if the global debates on AI have been transfixed by ethics, then AI music studies demand an urgent and transformative concern with aesthetics. I proceed by examining: in relation to creation, questions of aesthetic value and of vernacular creativity; in relation to curation and reception, recommendation and the shaping of aesthetic subjectivities; and in relation to the object itself, how AI is propelling the evolution of music’s ontologies. Among the ideas with which my talk is in dialogue are Magnusson’s (2022) cognitive offloading, Stiegler’s (2019) grammatisation, Prey’s (2018) algorithmic individuation, and Goldsmiths’ (2011) uncreativity. To found a field of AI music studies, I suggest, necessitates taking stock synoptically to probe the speculative leaps of technology and discourse that otherwise go unchallenged. But equally, it means holding up paradigms from the humanities and social sciences forged in earlier mediatised eras and retuning them for the AI music present.

Biography

GEORGINA BORN is Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London. From 2010-21 she was Professor of Music and Anthropology in the Faculty of Music, Oxford, and from 2006-10 Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at Cambridge. Earlier she had a professional life as a musician in experimental rock, jazz and improvised music. Her books are Rationalizing Culture (1995), Western Music and Its Others (2000), Uncertain Vision (2004), Music, Sound and Space (2013), Interdisciplinarity (2013), Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (2017), and Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (2022). She has held the Bloch Professorship in Music, UC Berkeley; the Schulich Distinguished Professorship in Music, McGill; a Visiting Professorship in the Schools of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, UC Irvine; Professor II in Musicology, University of Oslo; a Senior Research Fellowship, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies; and she has been a Global Scholar in Music, Princeton University. Awards include the RMA’s Dent Medal (2007), a Fellowship of the British Academy (2014), an OBE ‘for services to anthropology, musicology and higher education’ (2016), and the IMS’s Guido Adler Prize (2024). From 2021-26 she is directing an ERC-funded program called ‘Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’, which, through music, researches the impacts of AI on culture.