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Generative Sound: Using AI for Musical Creativity

via MITx Online

Overview

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Discover the foundations of making music with AI, draws from a conversation with Portrait XO, a successful electronic musician based in Berlin. You’ll explore the ethics of how AI tools are built and used; contextualize AI within a long history of musical instruments, electronic production, and listening spaces; and use sampling as a lens for thinking about creativity, credit, and ownership.

The course pulls these threads into three connected frameworks—instrument and context, sampling, and learning and trust—to give you a durable way to evaluate today's AI music tools and whatever comes next.

Generative Sound: Using AI for Music Creativity is one of the vertical courses in Universal AI, a self-paced program designed to help you go from beginner to AI authority—no coding or technical skills required.

Syllabus

  • Explain how a working musician conceives of creativity and authenticity with AI, including why the consent behind training data matters as much as the sound of the output
  • Situate AI within the longer history of musical instruments, electronic production, and listening spaces, rather than treating it as a clean break from the past
  • Compare how sampling has been treated across music and text—from folk and classical to hip-hop and books—to judge what counts as "original" and when learning from others becomes exploitation
  • Apply three core frameworks—instrument and context, sampling, and learning and trust—to evaluate new AI music tools, disputes, and the competing ethical and legal arguments around training data

Taught by

Ian Condry

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