Conference Agenda

The AI Song Contest (AISC), launched in 2020, is an international competition exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative process of songwriting. As a response to continuing advancements in generative AI, the contest enables direct collaboration between musicians and scientists — from across countries and regions, technical expertise, and musical and cultural traditions — who team up to explore human-AI partnership through the “co-creation” of a song. In analyzing the song entries and accompanying “process documents,” we examine how AISC has effected new modes of songwriting both as inquiry and as action. We uncovered layers of tension that arise in the cultural, technical, creative, and ethical spheres when artists adopt generative AI into their songwriting process. A collaborative work between an (ethno)musicologist and a machine learning (ML) scientist, both of whom served as AISC co-organizers, this paper attempts an inter/transdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and engineering that is increasingly vital as technologies continue to destabilize existing modes of artistic productions and impact the music ecosystem(s). Building on an earlier publication that probes the challenges teams faced in the initial edition of AISC when incorporating AI tools in their songwriting process (Huang et al., 2020), we further address emerging issues in the second and third editions (2021-22), such as 1) how affordances provided by AI tools vary when used to support narratives in different musical traditions and cultural heritages, thus impacting the labor needed to attain expressiveness and virtuosity, 2) how different types of ML models evoke different expectations and mental models, forms of human-AI alignment, songwriting processes and strategies, and the nature of human-human teamwork, and 3) how AISC entries contribute to such discourses as timbre and vocality, tuning and temperament, theories of listening, virtuosity, and the artificiality/authenticity dichotomy. This paper speaks to fields including (ethno)musicology, machine learning, human-computer interaction, music information retrieval, the philosophy of technology, and songwriting (as creative practice, as subject of critical inquiry, and as pedagogy).

In normative Western musical encounters between a body and an instrument, the body learns to interact with the physical interface of the instrument as given. This rarely involves consideration of how the physical interface of the instrument came to be, or what bodies were taken as the ideal or the norm of those who would play the instrument. When the body in question is marked as different from the norm and cannot interact with the instrumental interface, the relationship between body and interface can shift, more evenly distributing accommodation between the two parties.

In this presentation, I examine the history of the acoustic folk guitar in the United States, and show how its development gradually came to center an unmarked, normate masculine subject. I explore the cases of two influential guitarists, Elizabeth Cotten and Joni Mitchell, who, against the grain of this standardization, interacted with the guitar in non-normative ways, shaping the instrument to their bodies, rather than shaping their bodies to the instrument. Throughout her decades-long career, Cotten, who was left-handed, played a right-handed guitar upside down, which allowed her to pick with her dominant hand. This switch required a reconfiguring of both the traditional chord fingerings and the strumming and picking patterns used. Mitchell contracted polio as a child, which weakened her left hand. According to Mitchell herself, this disability spurred her to alter the interface of the guitar, creating a system of over fifty different tunings and innumerable hand shapes which facilitate the harmonic and timbral languages that are a strikingly original facet of her work.

Music theoretical research has historically privileged formalist approaches that interpret music as a static text. By focusing on the embodied experience of composing with an instrument, this project contributes to the growing corpus of work that emphasizes music as a dynamic, living cultural performance.

Scholars of popular music often rely on external journalistic lists—like the Billboard Hot 100 or Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”—to guide value judgements about what music should be studied. These lists, and the corpora built from them, continue to be the most common data source for analyses of rock music (Temperley 2018, Brackett 2016, Biamonte 2014, among others). Through their compilation process, the Billboard and Rolling Stone charts frequently emphasize white and male musicians, distorting the contributions of musicians outside these lists. To take one instance, the musical accomplishments of Karen O, the Korean American front woman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who pioneered post-Millennial rock music in New York City, remains excluded from existing literature.

This paper examines the role of biracial Asian American women artists and their influence on post-Millennial rock. Drawing upon Fabian Holt’s theory of genre (2007), I define this genre as music made after 2000 that splinters from the classical rock style from earlier generations. Focusing on tracks across the oeuvres of the Karen O, Mitski, and Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, I investigate the intersectional identities of the artists and their respective genre labels. Expanding on the work of Hisama (1993, 1999) and Mahon (2004, 2020), I unpack the various constructions of genre labels in popular music across different fields of music studies. I then argue that these journalistic rankings that celebrate music within existing institutional and capitalist structures prevent artists that look and sound different than the status quo—particularly women of color—from being fully celebrated within music studies. By situating examples by Karen O, Mitski, and Michelle Zauner at the heart of the rock genre, I demonstrate how music scholars can actively work against reinscribing canons of popular music that reinforce the white racial frame proposed by Ewell (2019). Shifting the focus from artists at the top of popularity charts to the music of Asian American women is one way we might ultimately create space to reconstitute the notion of genre from a more equitable perspective that combines institutional history and social awareness with musical analysis.

Chinese female rock star Tan Weiwei's virtual concert on December 11, 2020, presented eleven songs portraying the gender crisis in contemporary China. These songs overtly and covertly addressed emergent feminine issues such as gender inequality, domestic violence, the struggles of single mothers, systemic discrimination, financial crises, and social disconnection.

Responding to relevant discussions on how popular music intersects with gender, sexuality, and power (Cusick, 2013) and how cultural-specific gender ideologies impact music performance cross-culturally (Koskoff, 2014), my paper elucidates the concert's extra-musical messages and the public responses to the concert while situating the event within China's social reality and contemporary feminist movements such as Me2.

For this purpose, I employ Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice which conceptualizes the dynamic interaction among agents, self, and cultural production within a field of power. I examine how the concert reveals China's gender issues and portrays ideal gender status through the symbolic meanings embedded in the lyrics, word painting, the singer's vocal dynamics, and the performers' physical appearance and body language. I also explain how the performers, as agents, portray the self—including the reality of Chinese gender issues and the ideal image of women. I further situate the analysis of the songs within the field of power—China's multi-dimensional social reality composed of various power relations embedded in Chinese societal structure and culturally constructed gender ideologies.

I argue that the overall concert as well as its social critics and responses are China's cultural production representing two competing impulses, the negotiation for an ideal self versus resistance against a historically constructed gender ideology. Such cultural production exposes heightened tensions rooted in China's social and political powers and the entrenched systems of value judgment central to Confucianism and modern Communism.