MusAIcology: AI Music and the Need for a New Kind of Music Studies
Bob L. T. Sturm, Ken Déguernel, Rujing Stacy Huang, André Holzapfel, Oliver Bown, Nick Collins, Jonathan Sterne, Laura Cros Vila, Luca Casini, David Alberto Cabrera, Eric Drott, Oded Ben‐Tal · 2024
As music generated using artificial intelligence ({\em AI music})becomes more prevalent -- originating not only from individualsbut also services or businesses centered around scalable content generation --the need to study it and its impacts grow.How can this material and its sources be meaningfully studied and critically engaged with, however?The paper begins to answer this principal question by considering six aspects of AI music,discussing each with reference to a contemporary AI music service: {\em Boomy.com}.The six aspects are: the service or company;the founders and employees;the use of the service;the users; the algorithms;and finally the resulting music.While our investigations are preliminary,they open several interesting avenues of explorationfor many disciplines and their intersections,motivating a new kind of music studies.Given the speed at whichAI music and associated services are developing, we post this paper to {\em SocArXiv}and move on to establishing a community defining and exploring this new kind of music studiesvia organizing {\em The First International Conference in AI Music Studies:Prospects, Challenges and Methodologies of Studying AI Music in the Humanities}.\footnote{\url{https://boblsturm.github.io/aimusicstudies2024}}