Writing about AI and creativity in 2025 sometimes feels like fiddling while Rome burns

Anybody got a Sora invite they’d like to waste on me?

Check it out— two chapters from The AI Music Problem are now Open Access. Download and read for free!
www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

Last week to for vote for my panel "Can You Hear the Machine? The Disappearing Tells in AI Music" for South By Southwest 2026! Click the little heart in the link below to keep us in the running! participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...

PanelPicker | SXSW Conference & Festivals PanelPicker® is the official SXSW user-generated session proposal platform. Enter ideas and vote to help shape Conference programming for SXSW and SXSW EDU.

We can use your vote as SXSW decides who to include on this year's program! You can go to our proposal page and click the little heart emoji to vote: participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
And here's a little more about what we're up to: medium.com/@christopher...

I can use your vote!
I'm on a proposed panel for this year's South By Southwest @sxsw.com about music and AI w/ a dizzying lineup of co-panelists: @adamneely.bsky.social, @charlieharding.bsky.social (of @switchedonpop.bsky.social), and @Tristra Yeager (of @RockPaperScissors inc.) 1/2 w/ voting link:

Heavy way to start a morning, @mikeduncan.bsky.social, with the fall of the Girondins… I mean fall of the Mons Cafe crowd

Yeah! To my eye, a lot of this software has either a major mode or (more often in EDM) minor mode default. Taking meter into consideration would add more subtlety!

New article out! It's a collaboration in the journal Music Perception where we show that metric emphasis influences what listens hear as tonic/stable in pop music loops:
static1.squarespace.com/static/54518...

She Is in Love With ChatGPT A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do have sex.

This article feels like a clear example of techo panic that we'll all make fun of in 10 years. Note the use of #anecdata rather than any actual data in the reporting. #AI www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...

However, if our writing becomes the component of an AI’s dataset, it will—for better or worse—become a perpetual component in the corpus of an LLM. I do not mean to advocate that this is the right way to achieve immortality. But we’ll likely all achieve immortality along this route, nonetheless. END

So many of us work hard for most of our waking hours to create scholarship that will mildly influence a handful of other human beings, but our lifetimes of scholarship will be forgotten and disappear like fallen leaves in compost. .. (3/4)

In musicology—let alone the myriad subdisciplines slicing smaller and smaller portions of that disciplinary pie—we are lucky if we number our readership in the hundreds, and the citations in the tens. This audience is a microscopic portion of human who are living or will live. ... (2/4)

I'm conflicted about this footnote I just wrote: a thread:
I would only ever venture to place these kinds of thoughts in a footnote, but LLMs do provide a certain comfort for those of us working in esoteric text-based scholarly fields. ...

Everyone who receives an email from @kevinroose.com this week is going to be wondering whether his #AI wrote it...

Should @theorymeg.bsky.social and I create an early-music-themes #memecoin called #dufaynance? Yes or no or heck yah

Our paper about how we perceive AI-generated music was one of the TOP DOWNLOADED MUSIC PAPERS on SSRN over the last 60 days (with a grand total of 33...)
Get my totals up with a download of your own: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Deliver...

Got a working paper on Music and #AI with a bunch of coauthors. Gives a lay of the land in industry and academia. And, because AI has the potential to change how we think about expression, art, and education, we argue humanistic thinkers need a seat at the policy table. zenodo.org/records/1453...

OH wow, I love this!

Another problem with #music #GenAI: it's tough to actually get crisp, reliable datapoints out of audio. Here's a graphic showing what an #AI might "see" when it "listens" to Lizzo's Truth Hurts. OODLES of mistakes. #MusicScience #MusicTheory

Re Musical #GenAI, musical datasets are MUCH smaller than those in other media. Here's an infographic showing when a human would need to start reading/listening/watching to consume the whole dataset. In a landscape of ice-age-length data, music lives in a world of American and Maoist revolutions

OK people, let's take it down a notch and calm down with a gentle sleigh ride.

#CursedCarols

The 1981 chipmunks Christmas special is among the most underrated holiday content out there.

As far as I can tell, the Bill Murray Xmas special on Netflix just contracted a dozen talented folks, rented the Carlisle for three hours, turned on the cameras, and taped a bunch of one-take Christmas musical numbers. AND I LOVE IT. Strong recommend.

Or should I say— thanks to whoever gave that the GREEN LIGHT

“Ok hear me out— what if she blows out all the lightbulbs in Emerald City in her last belted sustain?”
“But that doesn’t make any sense”
“And what if there’s pulsing green lightning in the clouds behind her”
To whoever said yes to that ridiculousness: thank you

Reviewing an article with lots of content from #ChatGPT, and English seems to not be the authors' first language. I'm torn about how to think about this. Love the cultural accessibility AI allows, but lots of sentences aren't "by" the authors, and (worse) don't communicate their intended ideas

By the by, this is me starting to treat bluesky like I treated twitter ~5 years ago... a place I could just throw out ideas and hope to see other people's ideas!

Musical creativity both recombines inherited materials and adheres to set expectations. Here's a graphic I made: music boxes adhere to expectations but make nothing new, R. Scott's Electronium made new music but 100% randomly. #GenAI and #Humans are special bc they maximize both

Just a friendly reminder you can find “the love is gone” in the “Extras” of muppet Christmas Carol. (Also great ex. of mixture)