“Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem” is a collection of essays, edited by Clancy, exploring everything from robotics to ethics, music in XR (extended reality), to issues around intellectual property and the law. Clancy also appears as an author, and as interviewer with artist Holly Herndon and music industry executive Scott Cohen. Published by Routledge, the book owes its origins to Clancy’s own PhD work exploring the financial and ethical implications of AI in music, and as such most chapters have plenty of references, lots of further reading and very few pictures.
Looks can be deceptive, however, and at whatever level you approach it, it’s a fascinating read. Take Miller Puckette, whose Max visual programming tool for music allows you to (basically) build your own desktop music suite. His chapter opens by inviting the reader to see from his references section – or lack thereof – that this is not a piece of scholarly writing. Instead, he incisively dissects how the boundaries between designer, composer and performer; and researcher and realiser have broken down, and how the results of these new hybrid labours are “not so much a fixed entity, such as a piece of software, but as a creative practice”. This, he says, “becomes folk knowledge […] part of a more general culture”.

– Gemma Tipton, The Irish Times