The cross fertilization relationship between music and AI (based on experience with the CSM project)

While major issues in cognitive musicology, such as “what is musical intelligence?” and “Is its artificial formulation possible?” are still controversial we claim that research in this field has its own merits, for both AI and music, independently of the feasibility of achieving the ultimate goals. AI approaches provide the flexibility and descriptive power that earlier methods (numerical, grammatical) lack. From the AI viewpoint, music is an attractive, diverse human activity, with no coherent theory, but with a large body of informal theoretical basis, and criteria for performance evaluation. In this paper we study the cross fertilization relationship between music and AI as demonstrated in a work on building a knowledge base for the common terminology of Western Tonal Music: The CSM project. We discuss music developments driven by the AI approach, and AI developments driven by the music project.