Introducing AI Music Studies Music and Data, Volume 1

This inaugural issue of Music and Data takes up the emerging interdisciplinary field of AI Music Studies: the study of music generated by or with artificial intelligence, together with the practices, values, aesthetics, and economic and legal architectures that have formed around it. New music technologies have long challenged settled ideas about music and culture, but what seems different now is the scale and pace of generative AI's development, the breadth of domains into which it has spread, and the magnitude of resources being directed at it.

The seven articles gathered here were first presented at the First International Conference in AI Music Studies, held in Stockholm in December 2024. Drawing on musicology, music theory, music information retrieval, science and technology studies, and the political economy of platforms, they treat AI music as simultaneously a body of technical artefacts, a cultural form, an industry with its own logic, and a discursive phenomenon shaped in roughly equal measure by hyperbole and cynicism. Their concerns range from how music theory and musicology have engaged with AI and its longer history, through the rhetoric and practice of commercial AI platforms, to the technical representations and datasets on which those platforms rest, and on to the legal and economic architectures that increasingly govern them.

What this issue offers, rather than a single method for navigating this terrain, is a working demonstration of what serious scholarly engagement across its registers can look like - and an argument for why such engagement, sustained over time, is now indispensable.