Announcing 4 public seminars for Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies
Christopher Haworth
Date of the first seminar: Friday January 12 2024, 3-5pm UK Time
Location: The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Rd., London NW1 2DB
Title: Re-Engineering Recommendation – Prototyping Radical Interdisciplinarities
Presenters:
*Georgina Born, PI (UCL)
*Fernando Diaz (Carnegie Mellon University, formerly McGill University, Mila,
Google)
*Jenny Judge (University of Melbourne)
Abstract:
Scholars in the critical arts, social sciences and humanities have long sought greater collaboration with computer science and engineering. In this seminar, anthropologist Georgina Born, computer scientist Fernando Diaz and philosopher Jenny Judge present experimental work embodying this vision. The project focuses on reinventing recommender systems curating music and other cultural content by translating principles derived from public service media into sociotechnical design. This entails a methodology akin to Agre’s ‘critical technical practice’: sustained, critical interdisciplinary dialogues between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities. If recommendation is a key public interface with AI, existing research on recommender systems neglects their aggregate influence across populations and over time. Tackling this challenge, the project identifies universality of address and content diversity in the service of strengthening cultural citizenship as goals for recommender systems curating cultural content. To advance these goals the project develops a metric, commonality, which measures the degree to which recommendations familiarize a user population with diverse cultural content. The seminar probes the challenges of translating normative principles into sociotechnical design, as well as the project’s philosophical implications. Envisaging a new paradigm, this work contributes to the increasingly urgent concern with developing public good rationales for machine learning systems.
** This is the first of 4 seminars organized by the MusAI research programme between January and March 2024, with each seminar hosted by one of the contributing projects. The dates are as follows, and please NB: the times vary –
Seminar 1, Friday January 12 2024, 3-5pm – ‘Re-Engineering Recommendation–Prototyping Radical Interdisciplinarities’: hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, London
Seminar 2, Tuesday February 6 2024, 4-6pm – ‘Music and Copyright after Generative AI: Social, Ontological and Legal Perspectives’: hosted by Inspace, Edinburgh University
Seminar 3, Friday February 23 2024, 3-5pm – ‘AI and Practice-Based Research in Music and the Arts’: hosted by PRiSM, Royal Northern College of Music & Manchester University
Seminar 4, Friday March 1 2024, 4-6pm – ‘Towards Radically Interdisciplinary AI Pedagogies’: hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, London
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/research/music-and-artificial-intelligence
Christopher Haworth
Music and Copyright after Generative AI: Social, Ontological and Legal Perspectives
Tuesday 6th February 2024
4.30-6.30 pm
Location: Inspace, Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 1 Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9AB + online
Presenters:
Georgina Born (UCL)
Eric Drott (University of Texas)
Christopher Haworth (University of Birmingham).
**Featuring an electronic music performance by Owen Green (Max Planck Institute) and Jules Rawlinson (University of Edinburgh).
“Music, Copyright & Generative AI: Social, Ontological & Legal Perspectives” is the second in a series of 4 public seminars taking critical and creative perspectives on the current state of AI in music; it is organised by the MusAI research programme in collaboration with the ‘AI and the Arts’ group at The Alan Turing Institute. The speakers address the challenges posed by generative AI to existing music copyright regimes. Born’s presentation draws on anthropological literature to highlight key ontological categories underwriting property and ownership. Drott’s presentation focuses on automatic music generation services, asking whether copyright’s commitment to the individual author is called into question by the distributed nature of machine learning. Haworth examines the use of AI-based vocal cloning and source separation methods in official and unofficial productions of the Beatles’ and Beach Boys’ music. He highlights the moral anxieties that cluster around the use of vocal likenesses in pop, and the artist-led initiatives being developed to address these––many of which are in advance of copyright law.
MusAI Research Programme X The Alan Turing Institute Seminar Series
From mid-January to March 1st, the MusAI research programme (based at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies and UCL Anthropology) is collaborating with the ‘AI and the Arts’ group at The Alan Turing Institute on the delivery of four public seminars emerging from its research. MusAI is the ERC-funded programme “Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies”, the first major research initiative to examine AI’s implications for culture. It takes music as the medium through which to create a field of critical studies indicative of AI’s wider influence on culture, bringing together the social sciences and humanities, creative practice, computer science and engineering. Upcoming seminars are:
Seminar 3: AI and Practice-Based Research in Music and the Arts, Friday, 23rd February 2024, 3.30 – 5.30 pm
Location: PRiSM, Royal Northern College of Music & Manchester University, 124 Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9RD + online
Presenters:
*Artemi Gioti (UCL) *Aaron Einbond (City University, London)
Seminar 4: Towards Radically Interdisciplinary AI Pedagogies, Friday, 1st March 2024, 3 – 5 pm
Location: 1st floor British Library, The Alan Turing Institute + online
Presenters:
*Rebecca Fiebrink (University of Arts, London):
*Owen Green (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; UCL)
*Oliver Bown (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
*Georgina Born (UCL)