Uneasy Listening

This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI’s automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. As a result, notable AI-music programmers like composer David Cope and software developers Flow Machines have galvanized the public’s interest in AI-generated music not by creating completely alien sonic forms, but by simulating popular styles like rock and classical music. Consequently, listeners often report AI music sounds unnervingly familiar rather than aesthetically inaccessible. I argue that it is precisely AI music’s devotion to uncannily approximating its human forebears that makes it such an interesting object of contemporary sonic production. It also provides a useful historical parallel to a short-lived musical movement from the 2000s known as sonic hauntology. Much like AI programmers, producers of sonic hauntology applied digital technology to the sonic past. However, they confronted it in more deliberately political and subversive ways. Sampling sonic artifacts and cultural marginalia from the mid-20th century, sonic hauntologists created eerie soundscapes designed to challenge mass culture’s erasure of history’s political depth, or what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as late capitalism’s cultural logic of postmodernism. While AI music has yet to be exploited in this way, I argue its inherently “uneasy listening” carries the potential to further sonic hauntology’s project of repurposing the sonic past to estrange listeners from the present moment.