Organized by the Committee on the Annual Meeting and Public Events.
Musical deepfakes, AI-trained voice libraries, virtual pop stars, ABBA holograms—everywhere we turn, AI is changing our musical landscape. And we feel the same seismic shifts every day in our work as students, teachers, and researchers. Revolutionary tools like ChatGPT (now able to write, see, hear, and speak) and Google Gemini (now able to immediately translate text, decode images, and much more) challenge how we learn and teach, how we write and research, how we think and who we are. Does Generative AI spell the end of higher education as we know it? How will our fundamental roles as students, teachers, and scholars transform as AI becomes increasingly more powerful, immersive, and invasive?
This 90-minute multidisciplinary roundtable—featuring practitioners, teachers, and scholars navigating our contemporary AI universe—seeks to nourish AMS-wide conversations about the reshaping of music and musicology in response to the latest AI advances. The session will feature a roundtable addressing AI, music, and musicology in its contemporary, practical, and ethical dimensions. Five diversely positioned panelists will speak to the ways in which AI intersects with musical creativity, teaching, research, ethics, and scholarly life. The session will also allow ample time for Q&A, allowing ample time for session attendees to ask questions and contribute their perspectives about how we may start to grapple with the dilemmas and opportunities that AI will force us to confront for the rest of our careers. How are we, and all that we do, to remain relevant in a rapidly changing landscape? What opportunities and challenges does the Generative AI revolution present to us? Is it possible for AMS members to leverage AI as a collaborative tool, rather an imminent threat, in the classroom, the concert hall and the scholarly archive? Is AI poised to replace us entirely, or might the AI revolution help better define for us what it truly means to be human?
Panel Moderator: Mark Clague (Professor of Music; Interim Executive Director of U-M Arts Initiative) has staged a series of AI/creativity events, including broader symposia on AI/music/creativity for which Prof. Clague has served as moderator.
Panelists: Ritwik Banerji is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Iowa State University. His PhD is in Music from UC Berkeley. His work focuses on the development and use of artificial intelligence as a technology for ethnographic depiction, performance, and elicitation. Imani Danielle Mosley is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Florida where she teaches courses on AI. Her work on AI centers on music and ethics, streaming services, and critical metadata as well as AI in the digital humanities.
Garrett Schumann is a Lecturer in the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts where he has taught music-oriented courses, some of which engage AI as a topic, since January 2021. Last year, Garrett published a feature about AI and contemporary classical music in The New York Times.
Reba Wissner is Associate Professor of Musicology at Columbus State University. Her interest in AI lies in its pedagogical uses, challenges, and possibilities in music history and theory classes. Her chapter, "Using Generative AI in the Music History Classroom" was published in the edited collection, Teaching and Generative AI: Pedagogical Possibilities and Productive Tensions in early 2024.
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonist. Creative and ethical use of AI in the arts is one of her research interests and the focus of her Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Her current project Deep Drawing tests the machine’s capabilities for bringing the intricate noises of graphite on wood to visual life.
This session is organized by the Committee on the Annual Meeting and Public Events (CAMPE) in association with Charles Garrett, to whose life and in memory of whose untimely passing this session is dedicated.