Lecture Topic: Developing Musical Intuition as a Pathway for Creating Artificial Intelligence Models

Speaker: Jeffrey Stolet (USA)

Abstract: Musical intuition develops through a combination of objective musical knowledge combined with practice, rehearsal, experience, and deep engagement with music. Some of this knowledge is substantially objective such as patterns and inclinations related to harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and timbral structure. Other aspects of musical intuition develop through more experiential means. For example, what does regular practice of a musical instrument teach and how does it build muscle memory? What does the activity of musical improvisation teach? And what is the meaning of music’s emotional content? When we build a human musician we train the person in all of these ways as well as in many others. This allows the trained musician to quickly and efficiently deliver a beautiful musical product when called to do so. When we train artificial intelligence models, encoding these same musical experiences and bodies of knowledge into the AI models will be essential in order to produce successful aesthetic outcomes. This lecture will consider some of the ways we might move this vital musical knowledge and skill from the human domain to the technological dimension.

Date: To be determined