Abstract
From 2020 to 2025 at KTH in Stockholm, I ran the ERC Consolidator project "MUSAiC: Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism" (https://musaiclab.wordpress.com), an interdisciplinary research venture confronting questions and challenges at the frontier of the AI disruption of music. The timing of the project is remarkable: it began a few months after OpenAI's Jukebox gave lofi visions of what was coming, and ended at a time when digital service providers were wrestling with an inundation of their platforms by commercially-competitive music generated entirely by AI seeking to attract streaming revenue. Just a few months later, Sweden began 2026 with a viral hit song generated by AI being banned from the music charts. This talk will be centered on my perspectives before, during and after MUSAiC, and the variety of issues the project has wrestled with.
Bio
Since 2018, Bob Sturm has been an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2009, he earned a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in the domain of sparse approximation applied to music signals. He then moved to Europe, where he has lived ever since, holding academic research positions in Paris, Copenhagen and London. His research is focused on music informatics and artificial intelligence. He is also a composer of music, some of which people find troubling, e.g., https://bobltsturm.bandcamp.com/album/en-sv-r-jul