Musical Futures - Streaming and Artificial Intelligence in Music

This unit teaches you to harness two of the most potent domains of the online creative space – real-time online collaboration, and AI-assisted music production – within your creative and professional practice. You will explore the technical and functional aspects of live streaming for remote collaboration, virtual jamming, teaching, and performance. From there, you will apply streaming technologies to work collaboratively on projects online, in real-time. You will investigate current trends in assistive and generative AI music tools, including demixing and vocal removal, mastering, MIDI-to-audio conversion, vocal generation, generative music, and lyric writing. The ethical, creative and economic dilemmas posed by generative AI in the Arts are scrutinised and debated. Through hands-on workshops, critical analysis, and creative projects, you will develop technical proficiency and the confidence to integrate these technologies into your musical practice.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. Present applied technical knowledge of streaming apps and their underlying technologies;
2. Integrate live interactive streaming into a collaborative, creative or occupational music environment;
3. Interrogate the ethical and economic impacts of training and exploiting AI models to create music and art;
4. Critically review Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning concepts, models and methods;
5. Construct musical workflows with assisted and generative AI music tools in a range of settings.