Conference Agenda
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SMT Music and Philosophy Interest Group Meeting
Session Topics: SMT
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Livestreaming Musical Analysis: Streaming as a Form of Online Music Theory Pedagogy - Stefanie Bilidas
Livestreaming on Twitch cultivates strong communal relationships between streamers and their viewers and between audience participants (Flores-Saivaga et al. 2020; Ford et al. 2017; Taylor 2018; Wohn et al. 2018). A combination of entertainment and education, streams are about what T. L. Taylor calls “discovering together” (2018, 40). As real-time events, streams have a second life as Videos on Demand, turning them into fixed analytical objects. My lightning talk focuses on “music analysis” livestreams, where streamers ask viewers to make analytical remarks about either the perceived quality of several tracks or the appropriate generic category for the songs. To accomplish this task quickly, viewers use aural skills analysis based around “secondary parameters” (Meyer 1989, 15) such as timbre, texture as well as audio production. Driven by the parasocial relationship that streaming cultivates (Wohn et al. 2018), musical analysis becomes a sign of symbolic capital and economic capital when the streamer requires a small fee for interaction. As examples of “online pedagogies” over traditional “school pedagogies” (Vermeire et al. 2024), livestreams frame learning as a collective experience free of assessment (Thompson et al. 2024). Although livestreaming presents an alternative method of musical analysis, my talk will acknowledge how livestreaming often perpetuates a white- and male-centric way of listening (McDaniel 2021) and may create other inequities in music education. By examining the music analysis livestream as an analytical object, I show how music theory pedagogies of real-time and collaborative analysis are unique to the affordances of livestreaming itself.
Optimize this! Why do we care if an AI can write songs? - Andrew Goldman
Autonomous music AI systems like Suno (https://suno.com/home) can take in text prompts, and output audio of original songs. How can one compare human and AI-generated music, and what do different types of comparison reveal about implicit music-ontological commitments? I describe three ways to compare human and AI-generated music. To frame my discussion, I juxtapose my original song (“Optimize!”) with a song that Suno generated based on the same text prompt I gave to myself: “write an ironic song (for piano and voice) that criticizes the impetus to optimize our lives, focusing on themes of monetization.” The first kind of comparison is of products. Product-based questions center on music as a waveform or symbolic notation. I briefly compare some salient features of my product and Suno’s product. The second comparison is of processes. Such questions also usually center on processes of producing audio or symbols, and thus share ontological commitments with product-based questions. To compare my process to Suno’s, I briefly review some different types of AI architectures and some literature from music cognition on creativity. A third kind of comparison resists the work-based ontology of music: a comparison of musical practice. I argue that the social motivation to write my song, and the contexts for sharing my work, are all part of my songwriting activity. Of course, AI can contribute to social musical practice, but, in such cases, including Suno, AI music’s sociality is homuncular: it only has social purpose because the humans who use it do.
Anamorphosis, écriture and hypertranslation in the musical objects of Tristan Murail - Amy Bauer
Tristan Murail composes with musical objects, a model that for him encompasses multiple parameters: frequency, ambitus, gesture, articulation, absolute and relative duration, electronic synthesis and internal movement. He defines a “musical object” as material short enough to be recognized as one entity based on its psychoacoustic properties, even after transformation of one or more component parameters. This model expands to include natural, musical and literary allusions from the mid-1990s on, to embrace geographical and personal information in L’Esprit des dunes (1993–94), Le Lac (2001) and the Portulan series (1998–2011), with musical objects that function as both local and global referents. The journey from natural sound to composition represents an aesthetics of continuity in reverse, which Murail labels anamorphosis, characteristic of our perception of monumental natural events. Minute sonic objects take on an enhanced grandeur when assembled into the sweeping, large-scale sonic portraits that constitute Murail's maritime scenes, records of extended travel, or Liber fulguralis (2008), the latter a complex negotiation between video accompaniment, Etruscan mythology and the visceral experience of thunder. The musical objects that compose these works have the ancillary effect of depersonalizing them, establishing, I argue, a new tradition of musical écriture for electroacoustic music. Murail's sound images—detached from an initial, natural model through translation, distortion or " treason"—invite philosophical reflection. Their sonic universe stands even more evocatively for the nature that inspired it, as one of Alain Badiou's hypertranslations: a translation that exists on the threshold of knowledge, reaching for the sublime.
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