Professor Georgina Born from University of Oxford and AIAS Fellow from 2018-2019 has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for her project entitled 'Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies'. 

During her fellowship at AIAS, Georgina Born hatched many of her ideas for the ERC project, especially by bringing an interdisciplinary and international group of researchers together at AIAS for the conference on Music and Artificial Intelligence: Pasts and Futures, Opportunities and Risks, in May 2019. 

About the new MusAI ERC-funded project

Recent years have seen escalating concern about the impacts of artificial intelligence. While growing academic and policy literatures address the social and ethical implications of AI, as yet no major research initiative examines AI’s cultural implications. Music has long been a site of AI experimentation and commercial development in relation to culture; yet although considerable research resources are going to scientific and artistic projects in this area, critical research on music AI – despite the urgent need for such work – is at an early stage.

In this context, the MusAI project is groundbreaking in two ways. First, it takes music as the medium through which to create a field of critical interdisciplinary AI studies, indicative of AI’s wider influence on culture. Second, a guiding principle embodied in the project structure is that, to address the complex challenges posed by AI, radically new approaches are required that cut across entrenched disciplinary, methodological and epistemological divisions. To these ends the project will: 1) build a knowledge base addressing core critical issues in music AI through a coordinated group of studies designed to move beyond existing impasses between the AI sciences and critics; 2) enable music AI scientists and social scientists and humanists to engage in unprecedentedly rich and sustained interdisciplinary dialogues; and 3) through these engagements, trial new forms of interdisciplinarity for music AI and for the digital humanities, feeding the results into innovative interdisciplinary AI pedagogies.

The project integrates early career and world-leading researchers with links to key institutions (including the BBC, Spotify, Anghami and Mila). MusAI is led by an anthropologist expert in music technology and digital media studies, Chair of the British Academy’s Culture, Media and Performance Section.    

Contact

Georgina Born OBE FBA
Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford

Professorial Fellow, Mansfield College, Oxford 
UK

Phone: +44 (0)7968 281026
E-mail: georgina.born@music.ox.ac.uk