The AI Music Problem: Why Machine Learning Conflicts With Musical Creativity

by Christopher W. White

Overview

Music poses unique and complex challenges for artificial intelligence, even as 21st-century AI grows ever more adept at generating compelling content. The AI Music Problem: Why Machine Learning Conflicts With Musical Creativity probes the challenges behind AI-generated music, with an investigation that straddles the technical, the musical, and the aesthetic. Bringing together the perspectives of the humanities and computer science, the author shows how the difficulties that music poses for AI connect to larger questions about music, artistic expression, and the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Taking a wide view of the current landscape of machine learning and Large Language Models, The AI Music Problem offers a resource for students, researchers, and the public to understand the broader issues surrounding musical AI on both technical and artistic levels. The author breaks down music theory and computer science concepts with clear and accessible explanations, synthesizing the technical with more holistic and human-centric analyses. Enabling readers of all backgrounds to understand how contemporary AI models work and why music is often a mismatch for those processes, this book is relevant to all those engaging with the intersection between AI and musical creativity today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032959764
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/15/2025
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Christopher W. White is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Table of Contents

1. The Problems Facing Musical Artificial Intelligence

2. History, Engineering, and Motivations Behind Generative Musical AI

3. Collecting Examples for Musical Datasets

4. Representing Music to an Artificial Intelligence

5. Musical Structure is Hard to Learn

6. Interpreting Musical Artificial Intelligence

Editorial Reviews

"White is back with another timely topic, complete with his characteristic attention to rich and relevant context, and to engaging, communicative, and inclusive writing. Inclusive though it is, The AI Music Problem does not pull punches– expect to be challenged with a strong argument not only for why AI music currently falls short but (much more interestingly) why he thinks it always will."

—Mark Gotham, King's College London

"Chris White provides the definitive guide to one of 21st-century music's most pressing questions. Approaching the topic from a wide variety of angles, The AI Music Problem is both clear and thorough in its exploration of what we should expect as technologies continue to advance, and, perhaps more importantly, what we shouldn't."

—Cory Arnold, 12tone YouTube channel

From the Publisher