Project description
Artificial intelligence plays music
Artificial intelligence (AI) has many applications in a wide range of fields. Its application to the arts gives rise to several important questions of ethics and artistic practice. The EU-funded MUSAiC project addresses many of these questions in relation to music. It will develop the first music pedagogy for AI. It will study methods for understanding and benchmarking AI, and improving its application. It will implement and test new AI that adapt as 'digital apprentices'. MUSAiC will help make AI applied to music be responsible and robust. It will prepare music practitioners and audiences to listen to and work with music in new ways. It will also pave the way for the responsible AI transformation of the other arts.
Objective
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an especially disruptive technology, impacting a growing number of domains in ways both beneficial and detrimental. It is even showing surprising impacts in the Arts, provoking questions fundamental to philosophy, law, and engineering, not to mention practices in the Arts themselves. MUSAiC is an interdisciplinary research venture confronting questions and challenges at the frontier of the AI disruption of music. It aims to analyze, criticize and fundamentally broaden the AI transformation of three interrelated music practices: 1) listening, 2) composition and performance, and 3) analysis and criticism. For each practice, and grounded in two specific music traditions (Irish and Swedish), MUSAiC will document and critically analyze the impacts of and ethical issues surrounding AI. MUSAiC will formulate and implement the first music pedagogy for AI, the lack of which continues to result in the creation of AI systems that have only a surface knowledge of music. From this pedagogy, MUSAiC will develop new holistic methods for understanding and benchmarking AI, and improving them and their application. It will implement and test novel AI systems that dynamically adapt to specific users as “digital apprentices”, thus bringing human-AI music partnerships to new levels of fruitfulness. The outcomes of MUSAiC will facilitate applications of AI to music in robust and responsible ways, impacting a wide variety of stakeholders. It will not only prepare music practitioners and audiences of the present (human and artificial) for new ways of listening, working, appraising, and developing the art form, but will also pave the way for analyzing, criticizing and broadening the AI transformation of the other Arts. The PI, a leading figure in music AI and music informatics, is employed at a world-leading research department at the top-rated technical university in Sweden. He is also a composer, frequently illustrating his research outcomes through music.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
100 44 Stockholm
Sweden