Creative AI: Sound, Music and Interaction

Overview

This course explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we make, perform, and think about music. Focusing on sound, interaction, and creative collaboration, you’ll learn how AI can be used to build new kinds of musical instruments, act as a creative partner, and generate original audio and voice. By the end of the course you will be able to: - Explore how AI can be used to design new musical instruments and interactive systems that respond to gesture, movement, and sound. - Understand the role of AI as a creative partner in music composition and performance, and examine how this reshapes ideas of creativity and authorship. - Evaluate the ethical and legal implications of using AI in music, including issues around ownership, attribution, and the rights of artists and performers. - Experiment with practical tools for generating, manipulating, and performing music using AI, gaining insight into current techniques and future possibilities. Through hands-on walkthroughs, practical tools, and case studies, you’ll experiment with gesture-based systems, explore real-time music generation, and discover how machine learning can be trained to respond to human input. Alongside these technical explorations, the course invites you to engage with critical questions around creativity, authorship, and the legal implications of AI in music production. Featuring perspectives from leading artists, choreographers and researchers working at the intersection of AI and music, this course provides both the practical knowledge and critical framework to begin experimenting with sound and AI in your own creative practice. No prior technical experience is required, the course has been designed for anyone with a curiosity and a passion for exploring new ways of making music.

Syllabus

Interaction, music and dance

In this first week of exploring Creative AI: Sound, music and interaction, we will look at how AI can be used to build interactive applications, develop new kinds of expressive musical instruments, and how AI is being used to augment and inform new kinds of dance and choreography performances.

Creativity and authorship

This week, we’ll explore questions of creativity and authorship, and how AI’s growing role in making creative decisions challenges our understanding of the creative process and human agency. We’ll consider what this shift means for artists, musicians, and other creative practitioners, and examine the legal and ethical implications of using AI in music-making, particularly in relation to copyright, ownership, and authorship.

Generating audio with AI

In the final week of this course, we will look at how audio can be generated with AI. We will look at the ethical issues surrounding technologies like voice cloning, and discuss what impacts AI generated music will have on the music industry.