By definition, traditional music is in a constant state of friction with innovation, exemplified by resistance to ‘outside’ influences such as different instruments, different ways of learning, and forces of commercialisation. An emerging external influence is artificial intelligence (AI), which is now capable of synthesising music collections at scales dwarfing those crafted by people and communities. In this paper, we examine the impact of research and development of AI on Irish traditional music through case studies of two generative AI systems: folk-rnn and Suno. How can researchers and engineers (academic or industrial) who develop and apply AI to specific practices of music make meaningful and non-harmful contributions to those practices? To answer this question, we critically reflect on the tensions that arise between tradition and innovation, how Irish traditional music becomes subject to data colonialism, and the interdisciplinary challenges of ethically engaging as researchers with a traditional music community. We ask what perspectives are needed to balance the interests of academic research and value systems in traditional music communities, and provide three ways forward for computer science to deepen the considerations of their impacts on communities of practice.

As music generated using artificial intelligence (AI music) becomes more prevalent — originating not only from individuals but also commercial services — the need to study it and its impacts becomes important. How can this material and its sources be meaningfully studied and critically engaged with, especially considering the unprecedented scales possible with generative AI? The paper begins to answer this question by considering AI music along seven aspects: 1) the company providing an AI music service; 2) its founders and employees; 3) the use of the service; 4) the users; 5) the algorithms; 6) the music; and 7) the sustainability. We make our discussion more concrete by considering the contemporary AI music service Boomy. While our investigations are preliminary and focused on a single AI music service, we argue that they open several interesting avenues of exploration for many disciplines and their intersections to help prepare for the coming flood of AI music. This paper asks many more questions than it answers, which is a feature (not a bug) of it advocating for a new domain of study: AI Music Studies.

Human-nonhuman sound interaction and technologies aim to bridge the gap of inter-species communication. While they emerge from attempts to understand and communicate with nonhumans, they also raise questions on the ethics of nonhuman data use, for example regarding the unintended consequences such data extraction can have to nonhumans. In this paper, we discuss power relations and aspects of representation in nonhuman data practices, and their potential critical implications to nonhumans. Drawing from prior research on data ethics and posthumanities, we conceptualize two challenges of nonhuman data ethics for the design of Human-Nonhuman Interaction (HNI) and technologies in sound ecologies. We provide takeaways for how sensitivities toward nonhuman stakeholders can be considered in the design of HNI in the context of sound ecologies.

In this paper, I discuss how voice models created with artificial intelligence (AI) can facilitate potential diffractions (Barad 2007) and radically challenge notions of identity based on individuality and originality, instead emphasizing heterogeneous formations of the voice. In recent years, there has been an exponential rise in unconsented so-called deepfakes of musical artists flooding the Internet. Recordings of voices of Drake, The Weeknd, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and Frank Sinatra, to name only a few, have been used as training data on AI voice models, causing much debate around copyright law and intellectual property (IP). As a contrast, artists like Holly Herndon (with the voice models Holly+ and Spawn, developed by herself and Mat Dryhurst), Sevdaliza (with the voice model Dahlia, released via myvox.ai), and Grimes’s AI voice model (released via Elf.Tech), have embraced deepfake technologies, making available some of these models for public use for a fifty percent share of the royalties. Copyright and IP debates set to the side, this technology facilitates new material-discursive entanglements between voices, identities, individuals and collectives by letting a voice transform through one or multiple others in what can be described through the feminist concept of diffractions. Diffractions, in contrast to reflections or representations, maps the disruptive and transformative realisations of identities, processes, voices, etc. In studying the music made with these AI voice models, by the artists themselves or others, I ask: Are AI voice models replicating an archive of the voice, as reflections of another person’s vocal identity? Or can AI voice models facilitate diffractive potentials of the voice by creating new entanglements between the individual and the collective? How is agency in the creative process shifting between the actors involved in deepfake entanglements between people, voices, technology, algorithms, and data? What implications arise from such AI technologies directed at the voice?

This paper (a product of artistic research) engages with the following challenge: combine publicly available generative AI tools to simulate a commercial radio station, complete with dialogue, news and advertisements, and music programming. Our five success criteria for the “station” are: 1) it runs autonomously; 2) it features diverse content; 3) its content is generated and assembled in faster than real-time; 4) it sounds like commercial radio; and 5) it is engaging for longer than its novelty factor. We consider a variety of generative AI systems for text and dialogue, synthesizing expressive speech, and generating music audio. We describe our engineered pipeline and illustrate its components with several audio examples. We compare our results to other “endless” streams of content. Our resulting stream — “Stochastic Pirate Radio (KSPR)” — can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/@KSPRStochasticPirateRadio.

Boomy.com and suno.ai are two online services advertising music creation with artificial intelligence (AI). At Boomy.com, the user can click a few buttons to create tracks that are then distributed by Boomy.com to various digital service providers (DSPs), e.g., Spotify, Soundcloud, and YouTube. With suno.ai, users can make entire songs with a given stylistic description and their own or randomly generated lyrics, to then download. Who are the users? What are their motives? Can the interactions between community members point to potential values that these “AI music services” have for people aspiring to make music? And how can we study the communities around AI music without disrupting conversations and interactions between users? In this paper, we explore the potential of (auto)ethnographic methods of studying users of AI music services. When the field is situated online, the methods of studying it need to adapt therein. In our study of these two online music services, we have found it necessary to apply ethnographic methods in ways that do not reveal our identities as researchers, but instead give the appearance that we are bonafide users. In fact, most community members on the social networks associated with these services use pseudonyms and avoid disclosing protected characteristics, e.g., sex, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality. Through exploring the use of these services we have come to understand the services and the community more from the perspectives of an insider, yet lack direct knowledge of trade secrets. With an autoethnographic approach, we also reflect on our own experiences of making music with AI. Through this work, we see that many users of these services find value in working with music in ways that are not apparent from the advertising of the companies, i.e., a streamlined push-button-composition-to-distribution pipeline. 

This thesis examines encounters between music and nature through a productive and transversal approach to music analysis with examples from the contemporary Western art music repertoire. In three analytical chapters, I study how contemporary music potentially reframes the positions and relations between music, humans and nature by engaging with transversal concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thinking and drawing upon Judy Lochhead’s approach to productive music analysis. In Joan La Barbara’s Les Oiseaux qui chantent dans ma tête for solo voice (1976) and Kaija Saariaho’s Laconisme de l’aile for solo flute and optional electronics (1982), I study affinities between humans and birds through the concept of becoming-bird. In John Luther Adam’s Inuksuit for percussion ensemble (2009), I engage with the notion of coexistence between humans and the environment with the concepts of milieu, rhythm, and deterritorialization. Lastly, in Helena Tulve’s Extinction des choses vues for large orchestra (2007), I argue that her music confronts aspects of musical organicism by producing ruptures from its own modes of order, activated by the concept of the Body without Organs. I examine moments when the music functions on the edge of discursivity, and when the materiality of sound, bodies, instruments, and technology informs and reshapes musical discourses and cultural conceptions of nature. I further position the study within the field of ecomusicology, and draw upon aspects of posthumanist and new materialist theory. I particularly investigate contemporary music from perspectives that question human-centered ways of thinking and being, as well as ostensibly rigid conceptions of nature that appear separate from the domain of culture. From these theoretical perspectives, I understand nature and culture as entangled material-discursive processes, where the relations between music, humans and nature are constantly renegotiated. The contributions of the study are threefold. Firstly, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the musical works and composers studied in the thesis, and the cultural context to which they belong. La Barbara’s and Saariaho’s compositions expand upon bird music in the Western art music repertoire; Adams is positioned within American percussion music and American environmentalism; and Tulve’s work reconfigures the aesthetic paradigm of musical organicism. Secondly, this thesis manifests how the fields of Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy, ecomusicology, as well as aspects of posthumanist and new materialist thought fruitfully contribute to one another, and how music research benefits from expanding its theoretical perspectives. Lastly, I demonstrate how the study of contemporary Western art music can encourage new methodological approaches, such as a productive and transversal approach to music analysis, as contemporary music and its changeable compositional techniques and strategies require creative solutions to analytical problems. In extension, I hope this thesis demonstrates how these encounters between music and nature may also foster new and fruitful understandings of the contemporary world we all inhabit.