Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Composer Cantor Santiago debuts with a robust, upbeat meditation on how artificial intelligence is shaping music production. Driven to investigate the topic after using AI to complete Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in 2019, the author argues that technology is hardly new to music production, from the earliest bone flutes to the digital software and audio interfaces composers use to produce and edit music today. Still, he sees the role of AI as fundamentally limited, suggesting that, for all its gifts, AI alone is incapable of the kind of educated, intuitive reasoning and spark required to make art. Without human intervention, the music AI creates is “mediocre” at best and “total nonsense” at worst, Cantor Santiago contends (“It sounds like the music of a technically gifted student with no voice of their own, no sonic signature, and no semblance of... ‘musicality’ ”). Music, he notes, also succeeds due to emotional bonds that listeners form with the artists and their work; any AI music will need to similarly forge these connections. Though he sometimes slips into evangelizing, Cantor Santiago makes a convincing case that AI is less a giant leap for music than another step in the steady march of technological innovation that has failed to reinvent an inherently human creative process. Musicians will especially appreciate this enlightening and optimistic take on music’s future. (Dec.)