AI, ChatGPT and Instruction and Learning: AI and Music

Abstract:
Critical but often overlooked research questions in artificial intelligence applied to music involve the impact of the results for music. How and to what extent does such research contribute to the domain of music? How are the resulting models useful for music practitioners? This article describes work arising from research engaging with composers, musicians and audiences to address such questions: two websites that make their AI models accessible to a wide audience and a professionally recorded album released to expert reviewers to gauge the plausibility of AI-generated material. The authors describe the use of their models as tools for cocreation. Evaluating AI research and music models in such ways illuminates their impact on music-making.

Abstract (Open Access Journal):
This article explores the notion of human and computational creativity as well as core challenges for computational musical creativity. It also examines the philosophical dilemma of computational creativity as being suspended between algorithmic determinism and random sampling, and suggests a resolution from a perspective that conceives of “creativity” as an essentially functional concept dependent on a problem space, a frame of reference (e.g. a standard strategy, a gatekeeper, another mind, or a community), and relevance. Second, this article proposes four challenges for artificial musical creativity and musical AI: (1) the cognitive challenge that musical creativity requires a model of music cognition, (2) the challenge of the external world, that many cases of musical creativity require references to the external world, (3) the embodiment challenge, that many cases of musical creativity require a model of the human body, the instrument(s) and the performative setting in various ways, (4) the challenge of creativity at the meta-level, that musical creativity across the board requires creativity at the meta-level. Based on these challenges it is argued that the general capacity of music and its creation fundamentally involves general (artificial) intelligence and that therefore musical creativity at large is fundamentally an AI-complete problem.

The author's observations after listening to the output of new AI music platforms

"Hello World is the first album composed by an artist – SKYGGE – with artificial intelligence. Its goal is to show that AI can be used to create new, compelling music, generating fresh musical material of all sorts: melodies, harmonies, timbre, rhythms and the like."