http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucr_chass_music_ccmsai2026/rss Recent eScholarship items from CCMSAI 2026 Sun, 8 Nov 2026 16:11:57 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b78n2zd Plants and humans interact with the world through profoundly different systems. While plants are known to sense their environment, whether they perceive it remains an open scientific question (Ferretti et al., 2025). Interspecial Signal makes audible the electrical life of a living plant, placing that open question in the listener. A pothos plant is connected to Biotron, a consumer-grade controller that converts changes in the plant's bioelectrical conductivity into MIDI data in real time. That data drives bell-like tones, a radiating visual field, and Somax2, an AI improvisation system trained on a corpus of the author’s own voice, which shadows the plant's signal like an invisible vocalist. Audiences are invited to approach, gesture, and listen, and their proximity shapes what they hear and see. In that shared capacity for sensing, the work offers a point of entry into empathy with a form of life that can otherwise feel wholly alien. This paper documents the work's development... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b78n2zd Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Murphy, Erin E. Tabatabaie, Ashkan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/924262wr An instrument decides what part of the world is permitted to become sound. Each transducer, threshold, and sensor mapping isolates some property of a material and discards the remainder, according to choices made by whoever built the device. Material Synthesis Composition (MSC), the method outlined in this paper, anchors the work in those exact choices: I map the behavior of a material substrate onto compositional structure, and a human performer and a machine listener work within those dynamics. MSC grows out of Speculocultural Technopoiesis (ST), my doctoral framework, which examines how Black speculative traditions and sonic ways of knowing can direct the modification of audio tools. Writing as an experimental media artist, I take composition to include selecting materials, modifying instruments and algorithms, fixing the mappings, and conducting the session. The case is Did Sun Ra Fear Cryosleep?, the water movement of the interactive triptych Organic Memory, in which an earthen... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/924262wr Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Woodland Jr., Darren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qq7p6qf Co-Creativity in Music, Sound, and AI: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition: Introduction to the Conference Proceedings https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qq7p6qf Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chagas, Paulo C. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bp9j6f4 Embodied Calligraphy integrates guided and improvised movement, Chinese calligraphic animation, sonification, and AI-mediated interaction through computer vision-based motion tracking and real-time audiovisual feedback. The project explores co-creation among three interconnected agencies: the artist-designer, participants, and interactive technologies. Drawing on intersemiotic translation, multimodal social semiotics, and somaesthetics, the research shows how calligraphic strokes are transformed into bodily gestures and audiovisual expressions, while meaning is distributed through collective interaction. Reciprocal exchanges among dancers, participants, and interactive technologies encourage imitation, improvisation, shared authorship, bodily awareness, and self-fashioning. Based on a participatory workshop at the University of California, Riverside, the study explores how programmed interactions and dancers' guidance influence participants' creative choices and collective engagement.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bp9j6f4 Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cheng, Ka Hei https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8443b8r8 Generative AI music systems enter a production environment in which composers are already asked to work quickly, respond to temp tracks and stylistic references, deliver modular revisions, and produce music whose commercial value may depend on functional similarity. This paper examines AI music through the linked problems of labor, attribution, and platform governance. It argues that generative systems are especially disruptive where musical work has already been standardized around speed, style replication, and low-cost synchronization. The analysis distinguishes human influence from model training, separates attribution from copyright ownership, and treats human authorship as a gradient of documented expressive contribution. It then examines the movement from post-hoc AI detection toward provenance-by-design: licensed-source metadata, generation logs, content credentials, watermarking, labeling, and royalty routing. Developments in 2025–2026—including licensing settlements,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8443b8r8 Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 López Duarte, Alvaro E. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mz4d8t1 Artificial intelligence (AI) in music has a long history extending at least to the early experiments of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson in the 1950s. In the 2020s the combination of powerful GPUs, large datasets, and pre-trained transformer models has produced a dramatic expansion of AI-based musical practice. This paper explores promising trajectories for AI-based musical co-creativity considering two conflicting realities. First, the ethical and technical challenges of musical AI are not entirely novel. They mirror issues embedded in early digital and pre-computational algorithmic systems. Second, musical AI research and development has undergone a shift in its center of gravity to the private sector as seen in companies like Suno, and Google’s Magenta project, due in part to greater corporate computational resources and gigantic datasets that may not always be fully compliant with copyright law. Given the disparity in computational and data resource levels between academia... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mz4d8t1 Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lyon, Eric https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc045fc Circulation in and for Artificial Life is an audiovisual work that investigates the emergence and persistence of identity within a computational environment that never reaches a stable state. Multiple artificial-life entities exist within an abstract ray-marched world whose visual parameters are continuously rewritten by scripts. Each frame is further transformed through a process of UV collapse driven by the electroacoustic sound composition. In particular, high-frequency cello material, especially during moments of increasing intensity toward the electroacoustic climax, activates a turbulence-based transformation that violently tears and displaces the UV coordinates of the rendered image. The artificial entities analyze the final rendered result of every frame, including the effects of UV collapse, and modify their scale, color, and shape through a genetic-algorithm-based process in an attempt to maintain visual identity. However, during the most intense moments of UV collapse,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc045fc Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Oda, Masafumi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cx1x61z Ecosystemic music is a framing of musical systems based on natural ecosystems. Just as energy moves through ecosystems, so too does sound and data move through musical systems. By making this connection between musical systems and ecosystems explicit, I examine how the study of ecosystems can inform the creative and technical choices in the design of these systems. The role of AI in ecosystemic works is twofold: first to enable data and sound processing at a larger scale than has been possible, and second to provide a method of decision making that is distinct from human interpretation. These systems fundamentally propose a method of improvising or performing with AI systems. I examine these dynamics through two approaches to developing systems for co-creativity using algorithmic composition and AI. The first approach is the use of algorithmic systems for recording analysis and playback that respond to real-time inputs such as performer audio or listener presence. The second is... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cx1x61z Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gerard, Garrison https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xz2p2hw Central to questions of co-creativity and “AI”–which we define as both generative and assistive AI models built from machine learning and other computational systems–are the ways in which different types of artificial intelligence programs impact the music workplace. The following assembles highlights from a roundtable held during the conference that explores how AI music tools reshape the creative process as well as how labor operates in these spaces. Who creates AI tools for musical applications, who controls their operations, and who gets to use them? What are the costs and consequences of AI usage, from environmental destruction to power imbalances in the music industry? We came to this panel in order to discuss these crucial questions. This discussion draws on the expertise of five professionals located across popular music: scholars who study music production, producer-scholars, and professionals whose primary work is in production. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xz2p2hw Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Duchêne, Frank Agnes Huether, Kathryn mesmi, mesmi Przybylski, Liz Skjerseth, Amy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61h0x0pn Maintained by Omission is an audiovisual composition that explores the tension between habitual human perception and machine-assisted perception. Rooted in Vilém Flusser’s media philosophy, the project approaches artificial intelligence not as a conscious entity, but as an interactive processing mirror within a cybernetic, dialogic feedback loop. Grounded in the premise that human cognition routinely filters out environmental noise to maintain perceptual stability and social balance, keeping us from being overwhelmed by the world's constant, unfiltered saturation, this paper takes the reader on an inward journey through the project's creative process—mirroring how the composition itself turns inward toward the hidden layers of human perception and daily life. Through an interactive dialogue across language models (ChatGPT, Gemini), audio architectures (Max/MSP Somax 2), generative video models (RunwayML), and AI audio generators (Suno), raw human observations—captured via environmental... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61h0x0pn Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mares, Ariana https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5054d1b1 Short Concert for the Last 74s of Topsy is a generative audiovisual work that departs from the case of Topsy, an elephant electrocuted in Coney Island in 1903 and filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company, in order to interrogate the relation between technique, memory, and the asymmetry of power. In this essay, I take the original footage as the perceptual field of a system developed in Max/MSP/Jitter, which translates the pixels of the archive into sound through the technique of sonification, within a paradigm of symbolic AI made of explicit rules and without machine learning. I discuss the idea of a music latent in the image, revealed by a non-human intelligence indifferent to affect: the mapping rules are authorial, and the algorithmic testimony is produced, not discovered. To opt for the legibility of these rules, against the opacity of the black box, is a deliberately ethical and political position, enunciated from the Global South, because it makes inspectable who decides... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5054d1b1 Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Motta Bossa, Vitor Ferreira https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t87x4rw Charade (1963): Alternate Edit Film Score for Chamber Orchestra (2026) is a new film score for the eponymous classic 1963 film starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, directed by Stanley Donen. It was commissioned by the Unequal Fifths Composer Collective, of which I am a founding member, and composed for my chamber orchestra, the Martians. This paper employs both technological and analytical methodologies to describe the creative process that went into the composition of Charade: Alternate Edit Film Score. I discuss my use of AI Stem-Splitting technology to isolate the film dialogue from the monaural audio containing the original Henry Mancini score, as well as the more expansive use of various other narrative and technical tools to edit the film, each of which helped to drive my creative process. Charade: Alternate Edit Film Score demonstrates the inherent creative fecundity of the transformation of original video elements from a given film in the public domain, in this case... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t87x4rw Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gibson, Patrick https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4k64p1fz Within the Euro-American art-music tradition, creativity has largely been framed through humanist paradigms privileging individual authorship, intentionality, and stylistic innovation. The growing presence of generative AI and machine learning (ML) in composition and performance unsettles these assumptions and calls for a rethinking of creative agency. This paper asks how the integration of artificial neural networks into live vocal improvisation reshapes musicological concepts of authorship, performance, and agency. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s situated, hybrid subjectivities, Rosi Braidotti’s relational posthuman subject, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage, and Dominic Pettman’s account of sonic intimacy, it develops a posthumanist framework that is tested against two case studies: Tomomibot, by Tomomi Adachi, Andreas Dzialocha, and Marcello Lussana, and ULTRACHUNK, by Jennifer Walshe and Memo Akten. Combining philosophical inquiry with musicological analysis of vocal... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4k64p1fz Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Paradiso, Paolo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2hz056zd This article reflects on “Duo Squared” and “Mirage,” two improvisational works that pair human musicians with AI-generated versions of themselves. Both works use Somax2, an interactive music system that recombines analyzed slices of audio corpora in response to live performers. Their bespoke corpora are drawn from the H2H Music Improv Dataset, specifically recordings of the participating musicians improvising together. Consequently, the systems reproduce not only each performer’s characteristic sounds and gestures, but also musical responses originally created in dialogue with a particular partner. Through practice-based reflection, the authors examine whether musical AI should resemble human collaborators, generate unfamiliar behavior, or operate as a reflective tool through which improvisers can interrogate their own creative practices. Performance experiences reveal moments in which distinctions between human and AI partners become difficult to hear, complicating perceived... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2hz056zd Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Albert, Jeffrey Cammarota, Anthony https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1412t0k0 This paper examines AI-generated music as a twenty-first-century form of propaganda, analyzing how synthetic songs shape collective identity and political belonging without top-down institutional control. Focusing on the viral AI-generated song “We Are Charlie Kirk” and its accompanying YouTube video, I trace how AI tools construct an in-group world of Christian nationalist imagery, drawing on ethnomusicological and media theory frameworks alongside historical precedents in fascist radio broadcasting, Nazi martyrdom songs, and Cold War-era country music and Hollywood film. Using reverse-prompt research on the commercial platform Suno, I show how a simple prompt can generate a fully realized martyrdom ballad, revealing the racialized and class-coded assumptions embedded in AI music generation. I further show how ironic remixes and covers of the Kirk song, rather than subverting its message, extend its circulation and reinforce in-group and out-group dynamics. A comparative case... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1412t0k0 Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Swire, Sonnet https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09535009 Current discussions of artificial intelligence in music often focus on AI-generated artifacts and whether machines can compose autonomously. This paper shifts attention from finished outputs to the broader creative workflow, asking how generative AI can participate in audiovisual composition without directly generating the final score. Through two practice-based case studies, this paper examines AI across conceptual development, prompt mediation, material generation, research, evaluation, and reflection. In the first case, conversational AI supported concept and prompt development, while an image-to-video system produced visual material that required substantial human editing before independently composed music was added. The second case examines a Dunhuang-inspired dance film in which AI supported cultural research, theoretical inquiry, and audiovisual ideation, while verification, composition, orchestration, synchronization, and aesthetic judgment remained human-directed. Drawing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09535009 Mon, 2 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cao, Wanying