WP5: Prototyping Radically Interdisciplinary Music AI Pedagogies

Rebecca Fiebrink, Professor of Creative Computing at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts, London

A final stage of the MusAI program (years 4 and 5) translates the results of the earlier projects into new interdisciplinary pedagogies for students being trained in AI both in computer music/arts and in CS/engineering. This project responds to growing calls for new interdisciplinary pedagogies to train future AI practitioners that are cognisant of AI’s social and ethical implications (Crawford & Calo 2016; Royal Society 2017) – to which we add its cultural implications. Such calls are exemplified in MIT’s aim to educate ‘a new generation of technologists in the public interest’, and that of KCL, Arizona State University and UNSW to train ‘socially aware’ AI engineers who take courses in ‘social context’ (KCL May 2019). While welcome, these initiatives rest on two questionable premises: first, that a body of critical research on AI exists to inform such trainings; second, that the AI sciences need not be transformed by SSH engagements – since ‘social context’ conveys that the ‘social’ is not inside AI but a casing that need not disturb the core AI sciences. By creating a new field of critical music AI studies through dialogues between CS and SSH, MusAI will build the research base on AI’s cultural implications on which to develop these interdisciplinary AI pedagogies.

As a final reflexive stage in MusAI’s collective work, the project will communicate results to the next generation of students as well as via public outreach and participatory education, seeding wider changes in the culture of AI. The project is led by Prof. Rebecca Fiebrink, who has pioneered radically interdisciplinary AI pedagogies and will extend this work with the support of MusAI.