A Conversation with Ravi Krishnaswami & Chris Grobe | March 26, 2024 @ 4:30-5:30 I CHI ThinkTank
In the last few years, an expansive array of AI music platforms have found their way into the world of digital music production. Google offered up MusicLM, a pioneering text-to-music tool capable of generating songs from simple prompts, Meta open-sourced MusicGen, a powerful music generation model that could transform text prompts into high-quality audio samples, many other tools like: OpenAI’s MuseNet, Soundraw, AmperMusic, and Soundful found their way onto musician’s laptops as well. These tools have not only expanded the library of stock music available to marketing professionals, but have also offered the promise of seamless customizability in their application.
In this event, part of AILA’s 2024 Spring Learning & Discussion Series, we welcome Ravi Krishnaswami, the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College, to share his latest research on the latent priorities, assumptions, and epistemologies that drive the use of digital stock music in the new era of AI. After delivering his paper titled, “Emotions on Demand: How AI Music Scoring Interfaces Combine Game Engines, Music Data, and Machine Listening ” Krishnaswami will be joined in conversation by Chris Grobe, whose own research interests surround how ideas and techniques are carried from the arts into STEM fields and tech-industry practices. Come join us for this thoughtful discussion on technology and creative practice.
This event is open to anyone interested in the complex interactions between Artificial Intelligence and music makers and users as well as anyone wanting to think critically in the realm of AI and creative practice. We welcome faculty, staff, and students from the Five Colleges!
Location: Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Lyceum, CHI ThinkTank @ 4:30p!
Bios:
Ravi Krishnaswami is a musicology and ethnomusicology PHD candidate at Brown
University, where he is researching how technology, labor, and creativity intersect in
music for media. He is a composer for advertising, video games, television, and film, and
co-founder of COPILOT Music + Sound. He has studied sitar with Srinivas Reddy, and
guitarist in The Smiths Tribute NYC on guitar. He is currently the Joseph E. and Grace
W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College.
Chris Grobe specializes in the twentieth-century entanglement of literature, performance, media, and technology in US culture. Following “performance” wherever it goes, he studies the role of personal storytelling in politics and art (e.g., The Art of Confession), the place of the theater in print-centric literary studies (e.g., “On Book”), the theatricality of US electoral politics (e.g., “The Artist Is President”), and the role artists play in constructing new technologies and determining their cultural significance (e.g., “Every Nerve Keyed Up”).
Feel free to email aila@amherst.edu with any questions related to the event!