Talk by Bob L. T. Sturm on AI in music, 26. 11.

Abstract: From 2020-2025 I led the ERC Consolidator Grant MUSAiC (https://musaiclab.wordpress.com) that studied how AI is impacting our relationships to music: how we listen, compose and perform, and critique. This spanned a time when AI fascinated and humored the public imagination through such applications as text-to-image generation (Midjourney Apr. 2022), text-to-music audio generation (Suno Dec. 2023), and general purpose chatbots (ChatGPT Nov. 2022). That fascination and humor, for me, began to erode in 2024; and by the end of my project I was suffering from an existential crisis that is still with me. In this direct and honest talk, I will review my project and the context of my existential crisis and then discuss some of the efforts I have made to address my predicament.

Bio: Bob is Associate Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. He specializes in music and artificial intelligence, music informatics, computer music, and Irish traditional music.

26. 11. 2026, 16:00

Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Room 2.32 

The event is a part of the Strategy AV 21 programme AI: Artificial Intelligence for Science and Society.