This talk explores authorship and creative agency in new experimental music in the context of generative AI. It argues that historical and emerging authorial practices and norms in new music - where chance, collaboration, algorithmic composition, open forms, coordination and curation have all been commonplace - tell a unique story of human agency and creativity, one that is instructive for how we think about creativity, and perhaps even consciousness, in relation to AI.

Bio

Professor Stephen Graham is the Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork. Stephen's first monograph, Sounds of the Underground, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. Stephen's second monograph, Becoming Noise Music, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Stephen co-authored a multi-generic history of twentieth century music for Cambridge University Press, Western Music in the Twentieth Century (2022, with Prof Tom Perchard, Prof Holly Rogers and Dr Tim Rutherford-Johnson). Stephen's Authorship and New Music in the Twenty-First Century is currently under contract with Cambridge.