AI-Generated Music

AI-generated songs are now found and “Liked” throughout the social media world, many of which are deepfakes of popular artists. The fact that these do not seem to negatively affect their reception on the part of the artists’ fans is an extraordinary phenomenon that raises basic questions about what trendy music is and what its role has been since the origins and evolution of pop culture. Given the popularity of AI songs, and the rapidity and massiveness with which they can be produced, they cannot be ignored simply as fleeting trends. This chapter will discuss the implications of this trend, given moreover that AI is now transcending the deepfake trend to create its own novel vocal, operatic, and instrumental works. Can such AI-generated music evoke the same kinds of feelings and emotions of the traditional human-composed musical works? Or is it “music-by-design” that lacks the depth of feeling that, say, a symphony by Beethoven would arouse, or the transgressive power of songs by counterculture rock and hip-hop artists? Will AI turn music once and for all into a mass-produced commodity, as the Frankfurt School theorists believed about art in a mass consumerist culture? These are the kinds of questions that will be examined in this chapter.