@chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Music theorist & autism dad. Forthcoming book= The AI Music Problem, Routledge. Sometimes in Slate and the Chicago Tribune. The last King of Rome.
I had an absolute delight chatting with H‑Music's Editor Andrea Calilhanna’s about music, the body, and computers on their podcast last week! @h-net-humanities.bsky.social Check it out:
The Music in the Data: How We Hear, Feel, and Compute Sound | H-Net
Dive into the hidden patterns that shape how we hear music. In this conversation with Associate Professor Christopher White, we explore how big data, cognitive science, mathematics, and AI are transfo...
networks.h-net.org
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
"As anyone who has cooked chicken breast in a microwave or made music with a generative AI will attest: even if this technology is faster, convenient, and more complex, it is not necessarily better." <- pleased w myself for that lil phrase from the intro of my new music & AI book project #softlaunch
Hey y'all— come get paid to study computer-assisted music analysis (partially with me!) this summer in NYC. Applications are here: institutes.ams-net.org, and the longer description is.... [in the comments]
Writing about AI and creativity in 2025 sometimes feels like fiddling while Rome burns
Check it out— two chapters from The AI Music Problem are now Open Access. Download and read for free! www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...
Last week to for vote for my panel "Can You Hear the Machine? The Disappearing Tells in AI Music" for South By Southwest 2026! Click the little heart in the link below to keep us in the running! participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
I can use your vote! I'm on a proposed panel for this year's South By Southwest @sxsw.com about music and AI w/ a dizzying lineup of co-panelists: @adamneely.bsky.social, @charlieharding.bsky.social (of @switchedonpop.bsky.social), and @Tristra Yeager (of @RockPaperScissors inc.) 1/2 w/ voting link:
Heavy way to start a morning, @mikeduncan.bsky.social, with the fall of the Girondins… I mean fall of the Mons Cafe crowd
New article out! It's a collaboration in the journal Music Perception where we show that metric emphasis influences what listens hear as tonic/stable in pop music loops: static1.squarespace.com/static/54518...
static1.squarespace.com
This article feels like a clear example of techo panic that we'll all make fun of in 10 years. Note the use of #anecdata rather than any actual data in the reporting. #AI www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...
She Is in Love With ChatGPT
A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do have sex.
nytimes.com
I'm conflicted about this footnote I just wrote: a thread: I would only ever venture to place these kinds of thoughts in a footnote, but LLMs do provide a certain comfort for those of us working in esoteric text-based scholarly fields. ...
Everyone who receives an email from @kevinroose.com this week is going to be wondering whether his #AI wrote it...
Should @theorymeg.bsky.social and I create an early-music-themes #memecoin called #dufaynance? Yes or no or heck yah
Our paper about how we perceive AI-generated music was one of the TOP DOWNLOADED MUSIC PAPERS on SSRN over the last 60 days (with a grand total of 33...) Get my totals up with a download of your own: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Deliver...
Got a working paper on Music and #AI with a bunch of coauthors. Gives a lay of the land in industry and academia. And, because AI has the potential to change how we think about expression, art, and education, we argue humanistic thinkers need a seat at the policy table. zenodo.org/records/1453...
The Future of Musical Knowledge in the Age of Machine Learning
Machine learning and methods of artificial intelligence (AI) have become increasingly present for music practitioners, music researchers and music listeners. Going beyond the more widely-known cases o...
zenodo.org
Another problem with #music #GenAI: it's tough to actually get crisp, reliable datapoints out of audio. Here's a graphic showing what an #AI might "see" when it "listens" to Lizzo's Truth Hurts. OODLES of mistakes. #MusicScience #MusicTheory
Re Musical #GenAI, musical datasets are MUCH smaller than those in other media. Here's an infographic showing when a human would need to start reading/listening/watching to consume the whole dataset. In a landscape of ice-age-length data, music lives in a world of American and Maoist revolutions
The 1981 chipmunks Christmas special is among the most underrated holiday content out there.
As far as I can tell, the Bill Murray Xmas special on Netflix just contracted a dozen talented folks, rented the Carlisle for three hours, turned on the cameras, and taped a bunch of one-take Christmas musical numbers. AND I LOVE IT. Strong recommend.
“Ok hear me out— what if she blows out all the lightbulbs in Emerald City in her last belted sustain?” “But that doesn’t make any sense” “And what if there’s pulsing green lightning in the clouds behind her” To whoever said yes to that ridiculousness: thank you
Reviewing an article with lots of content from #ChatGPT, and English seems to not be the authors' first language. I'm torn about how to think about this. Love the cultural accessibility AI allows, but lots of sentences aren't "by" the authors, and (worse) don't communicate their intended ideas
Just a friendly reminder you can find “the love is gone” in the “Extras” of muppet Christmas Carol. (Also great ex. of mixture)
1) The ways keys are NOT transpositionally equivalent (e.g., how pieces in B major behave differently that in Bb) and how that changes over time (with @theorymeg.bsky.social) 2) Basically 1% of atonal 20th-c. music actually uses strict transposition, even tho we obsess over it in the classroom
dankettercello@danielketter.com · 2y agoBluesky academics, let’s get to know each other! Quote this & tell me: 1) a project you are working on & 2) an odd idea/theory you aren’t working on but keep thinking about 1) strategies for musical “informance” 2) chords aren’t real #AcademicSky
Love seeing all these new people from the #musicNerd #musicTheory and #musicScience worlds on bluesky! Welcome friends!
If you just want more #ChrisContent about music and the computational humanities, check out the most recent episode of the Café Technika podcast! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
Eps 07 - Christopher White of UMASS Amherst
Podcast Episode · Café Technika · 10/03/2024 · 45m
podcasts.apple.com
