The Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis: AI, neural networks and style appropriation


Free to attend, no registration required. Please visit our website to join the Zoom meeting

Borrowing, appropriation and intertextuality are particularly interesting concepts to explore given the recent acceleration in art and music produced using Machine Learning. Every network which is used to create art or music functions only because it is trained on a dataset of pre-existing work. Some of these datasets may be relatively modest – Dadabots’ Relentless Doppelgänger was trained on the music of technical death metal band Archspire. Others are huge – Stability.ai’s Stable Diffusion was trained on LAION 2B-en dataset, which contains over 2 billion text-image pairs. What does ‘style’ mean in this context? How is it expressed? And who owns it?