Music and AI Futures: For an Urgent and Radical Interdisciplinarity

Georgina Born, University College London

NYUAD Arts & Humanities-sponsored lecture in association with ISMIR 2026 (hybrid event).

Abstract

How is artificial intelligence shaping music-making, and what are its implications for musicology and music studies? For several years I’ve been directing a research programme, ‘MusAI’ (https://musicairesearch.wordpress.com/), that takes music as a lens through which to critically probe AI’s impact on culture. In my lecture I will reflect on this work and its fruits. MusAI has involved a sustained experiment in a rare, radical kind of interdisciplinarity between, on the one hand, music researchers from the arts, humanities and social sciences and, on the other, those from engineering and computer science. These encounters embody a form of agonistic interdisciplinarity in which there is a mutual drive to transcend existing disciplinary coordinates and limitations. Through the case of our work designing an ‘alternative’ music recommender system, I reflect on the experience of working with scientists whose orientation is towards crafting particular kinds of sociotechnical futures for music. An obvious finding is that not all music researchers today have equivalent authority; increasingly, there is a hierarchy of knowledges between the disciplines researching music, and, in straitened times, this is reshaping academic music. In the main body of the lecture I convey additional findings from the MusAI research and assess the incipient state of AI music studies, noting certain lacunae, particularly around questions of aesthetics and musical value. I ask: what can be learned from our interdisciplinary work when rapid and profound transformations of music are at stake? When our capacity to understand, control and change these directions are tested in unprecedented ways? And when humanistic approaches to music risk being eclipsed by the STEM music disciplines?

Bio

Georgina Born is Professor of Anthropology and Music at University College London. From 2010-21 she was Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford, and from 2006-10 Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music, University of Cambridge. Earlier she performed as a musician in experimental rock, jazz and improvised music. Her awards include the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (2007), a Fellowship of the British Academy (2014), an OBE ‘for services to anthropology, musicology and higher education’ (2016), the Guido Adler Prize of the International Musicological Society (2024), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lund (2026). From 2021-27 she is directing the European Research Council funded program called ‘Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’, which, through music, researches the cultural implications of AI. Her latest edited book is Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (UCL Press, 2022); Music and Genre: New Directions (edited with David Brackett) will be published by Duke in summer 2027.