Unruly

Intelligences in Music AI

placeholder · Tom/Emmie A UCLA DataX pilot mapping how music AI sorts, ranks, and silences.

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  • 4disciplines
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How do AI music classification and recommendation systems privilege predictability — and at what cultural cost?

  1. 01How do AI music systems contend with creative diversity, variance, and unpredictability?
  2. 02How do unruly expressive elements expose the epistemic limits of AI classification?
  3. 03What do those limits mean for data justice, accountability, and cultural pluralism?

placeholder · Tom/Emmie · one-line "what this site is" + links to strands / team / bibliography

Unruly Questions

placeholder content · the four real questions still to come from Tom/Emmie

Musicology

Why do these AI systems exist in this form at all?

related What is the detector trained on?

Statistics

Who decides what counts as similar?

related Who authorized that?

Law

What can law actually reach?

related What does the schema lack?

Creative

What if we built it differently?

related Did that demo count as research?

Unruly Terms

About this glossary In transdisciplinary work, a lot of time is spent on translation. As navigational guides to our joint exploration, we identified eight core concepts worthy of definition and debate. This glossary compiles our starting gambit for unruly definitions — what we hold in common, and where we differentiate.

Music

There is no such thing as music. Or, rather: there is no such thing as music in the universal, self-evident sense the word implies. The idea that music is a singular human practice — a language we all speak — is itself a culturally specific belief, and a relatively recent Western one. Ethnomusicology has wrangled with this for over a century: indeed, one of the discipline's first moves was to pluralize the term, to insist on musics. Its more provocative assertion, though, was to ask whether the term makes any sense at all in parts of the world distant from the European concert tradition. Many of the world's sonic practices are not thought of as "music" by those who perform them, but instead something more deeply intertwined with ritual, labour, devotion, or speech.

And so, when we say music, we are not naming a universal. In a historical sense, we are naming a (mostly Western) tradition organized around a set of discrete pitches of equal temperament, harmony, the work-concept, the author, etc. The unruliness of "music", then, happens when these particularities begin to masquerade as generalities, especially within technical infrastructures. When a streaming platform categorizes a monsoon raga as "E minor," for example, or a dataset recognizes only key signature and tempo, Western music theory is being mobilized less to describe music than to define it, globally, in epistemologically problematic ways. Music, in this sense, becomes a marker not of what we hear, but of a longstanding process of infrastructural universalization.

Classification

To classify music is in a sense to draw borders around sound — to decide what belongs with what, and, by implication, what does not belong at all. "Genre" is in many respects the most familiar of these epistemic borders, and one of the most contested. Musicology, and ethnomusicology in particular, has long been uneasy with the category: the names of genres are rarely neutral indicators of musical content, but rather carefully curated labels, motivated by the corporate histories of marketing, taste, race, and geography. The World Music debate of the 1990s, in particular, showed how an entire planet's worth of (non-Western) musical difference came to be lumped together under a single label — a label that revealed much more about the industry doing the sorting than the musics being sorted.

One of the big questions for our moment is whether streaming and AI dissolve these anxieties or magnify them. The corporate promise is one of dissolution: platforms speak of a "borderless" ecosystem, of infinite micro-genres, of recommendation unshackled from physical spaces. The reality, though, is that classification has not disappeared but rather become hidden within platform infrastructures. Genre tags are today assigned at scale — sometimes by experts, increasingly by algorithms, and at least until recently, as one Spotify engineer admitted, simply humanly invented in the name of algorithmic efficiency. Classification, then, occurs when music's plural ontologies meet technical infrastructures' demand that everything be sortable.

Intermediary (also Platform)

An audio reading of this definition:

Intermediaries are ubiquitous and mercurial. Deriving from inter- (between or among) and medius (in the middle), but distinct from the declarative mediator (to intervene or reconcile between two sides), the intermediary inhabits ambiguity. Its digital origin story is in the junctures of the material — nodes, routers, switches, proxies, gateways. Here intermediaries are both situational and propulsive, industriously shuttling suitcases of digital information across notched networks; an enterprise prided as mercantile, not mercenary. From this inheritance comes the core identity crisis of the modern intermediary. It aspires to clerical neutrality to the point of invisibility, but it does so with endemic self-importance. In between, everything is politics.

As intermediaries scaffold to platforms, the stickiest and best-known become monstrous assemblages of information exchange, attention-hacking, vanity, and profiteering. In the policy world, intermediaries are flashpoints. They entice and frustrate, thwarting all but the most determined with their aspirational camouflage, magnificent inscrutability, colossal power and, just as readily, wafer-thin responsibility. "Nothing to see here," the machine throbs.

Authorship

Authorship, sometimes correlated with "ownership," associates a creator or a group of creators with their creations. In the Western sense, authorship most often gestures towards the idea that an individual person (an "author") originates or creates an intellectual or creative work which is more often than not considered to be "original." The humanities, including studies of Western music, romanticize the notion of the single author, establishing that the individual authorship of original ideas is accompanied by a level of genius or mastery over the subject matter or art form. This sense of authorship, while frequently referenced, is only a singular point in a web of diverse social and cultural understandings of authorship.

Authorship is culturally and socially dependent, not unlike music. Beyond Western notions, authorship can be unknowable, unattributable, communal, collective, or unapplicable. Authorship does not always equate to ownership. Authors may choose to remain anonymous; they may make their work freely accessible. Authors may create derivative works, draw heavily on pre-existing works, or parody. Provenance — the lineage of custody of a product of someone's creativity — is often associated with authorship. Exchanges of intellectual property rights, works-for-hire, fair use, or Creative Commons may introduce novel complications to provenance. Yet even provenance can be falsified, debated, uncertain, or entirely unknown.

As music-making artificial intelligence advances, authorship and provenance become increasingly complicated. Such platforms blur and obfuscate lineages of authors and creators by presenting a curated front-end for users and a back-end black box within which answers to questions of authorship and provenance are housed but left invisible to users.

To come — Dataset · Recommendation · Algorithmic Systems · Attending To

Datasets · Interfaces · Wisdom

Three strands branch from one unruly center. Each is an entrance — the work inside is the team's to fill.

Unruly Datasets The datasets and audio models this project examines, and how each one logs (or doesn't log) musical difference.
Unruly Interfaces Alternative ways of representing and interacting with musical data.
Unruly Wisdom The shared reading list the project is built on.

Unruly Wisdom

reading list A reading list is a kind of argument. These are the works the project is thinking with — across musicology, law, statistics, and media — and a note on why each one earned its place. The list is maintained collectively in Zotero and updated as the project grows.

filter by topic

26 works

Bonadio, Enrico, and Chen Wei Zhu. Music Borrowing and Copyright Law: A Genre-by-Genre Analysis. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

why it's here

  1. Edited collection of short essays (approx. 20 pages) which parse out the challenging relationships between music law and different genres.
  2. Includes multiple sections, navigating different music in American but also  across the world. Sections include: Americas, Europe, Africa and Middle East, and Asia and Oceania.
  3. Gives the largest breadth of literature of music and its relationship to copyright law in different parts of the world.
Burkart, Patrick, and Tom McCourt. Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox. 2006. Rowan & Littlefield, n.d.
Burkart, Patrick, and Tom McCourt. Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2006.

why it's here

  1. Evaluates transition from analog to digital modes of listening.
  2. Traces current-to-the-early-2000s developments in law, technology, and corporate to evaluate how the digital music industry will work with distributiuon, access, and consumer privacy.
Cummings, Alex Sayf. Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2013.

why it's here

  1. Detailed discussion of Napster’s legal situation and role of piracy of copyrighted music in the advent of digital streaming
Drott, Eric. “Copyright, Compensation, and Commons in the Music AI Industry.” Creative Industries Journal 14, no. 2 (August 4, 2021): 190–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2020.1839702.

why it's here

  1. Survey of the relationship between copyright and compensation in the ecosystem of music streaming, focus on introduction of AI-based systems onto those platforms.
  2. Brings into discussion the role of the “commons” as a potential soulution to distributive justice in the face of commercial misoc and AI’s integration into user platform.
Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 145–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-145.

why it's here

  1. response to world music debate - questions whether or not the use of Afunakwa’s voice in Deep Forest should be justified/what rights and affordances singers who are the subject of ethnographic recordings should have over their works.
Fishman, Joseph. “Music as a Matter of Law.” Harvard Law Review 131, no. 7 (May 1, 2018): 1861. https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/578.

why it's here

  1. Seminal piece of legal writing, questioning legal ontologies of music and how “Blurred Lines” decision (2018) brought into question whether or not the law should have as much oversight as it does on music making and regulating copyrights
  2. Surveys historical approach to legal framing of music with particular attention to the United States.
Hesmondhalgh, David. Music Streaming Around the World. Univ of California Press, 2025.

why it's here

  1. Surveys role streaming platforms play in 12 different global music economies.
  2. Considers implications on contemporary cultures of music making.
Jaakola, Lyz, and Timothy B. Powell. “‘The Songs Are Alive’: Bringing Frances Densmore’s Recordings Back Home to Ojibwe Country.” In The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, edited by Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Woods, 575–90. Oxford University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190659806.013.32.

why it's here

  1. Recounts the digital repatriation efforts of Frances Densmore’s Anishinaabe and Ojibwe song collections.
  2. Poses that we need to allow Indigenous peoples in the United States, in particular, the chance to reclaim ownership over their music and their voices, despite legal challenges they might face as ethnographic recordings often attributed to individuals who take the recordings.
  3. Discuss challeges of repatriating digitized recordings.
Loughridge, Deirdre. Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020. New Material Histories of Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo208042715.html.

why it's here

  1. Draws on posthumanist perspective to analyze relationships between music making humans and assistive machines.
  2. Provides a concise history of different technologically-informed musical products, explaining how music and technology together can explain and challenge what it means to be human.
Mann, Larisa Kingston. Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power. UNC Press Books, 2022.

why it's here

  1. Identifies how cultures of collaboration are central to Jamaican creative practices.
  2. With ethnographic research, Kingston demonstrates how, as a result, music producers, musicians and audiences are resistant to the claims of copyright law and as an act of social/political commentary.
Michaud, Alyssa. Automatic Artistry: Negotiating Musical Creativity in a Technological Age. University of California Press, 2026.

why it's here

  1. Traces legacy of technological innovation and impact on music making

  2. Emphasis on interrelationship between performers and the technologies they use to make music.

Morrison, Matthew D. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. Univ of California Press, 2024.

why it's here

  1. Navigates history of blackface minstrelsy and racialized foundations of American music.
  2. Unpacks relationship between performance, race, and intellectual property, arguing that blackface performance materials would be integrated into commercial entertainment through the privileges, affordances, and restrictions of copyright.
Parks, Gregory S., and Frank Rudy Cooper, eds. Fight the Power: Law and Policy through Hip-Hop Songs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019804.

why it's here

  1. Collection of legal commentaries, considering how current policy developments exist within the context of hip-hop performance and the fight for Black equality.
  2. Emphasis on the development of criminal proceedings, using rap lyrics as evidence of admission of crimes.
  3. Book’s chapters consider other roles of law in hip-hop such as: gendered relations, stylistic specificites, and the significant role of sampling in music of Black American musical practice.
Perullo, Alex. “Digital Repatriation: Copyright Policies, Fair Use, and Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, edited by Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Woods, 0. Oxford University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190659806.013.30.

why it's here

  1. Navigates the challenges of legal policy and the digitization of music and attempts at repatriation.
  2. Argues we should still create digital collections for certain audiences (often composed of individuals whose music is being repatriated) as a way to “pay back” the damages of acquiring that music in the first place.
Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

why it's here

  1. Traces origination of country music in the United States
  2. Explores constructions of archetypes within the genre, arguing that authenticity is manufactured and created through the negotation of space between new and old materials.
Reece, Frederick. Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.

why it's here

  1. Explores motivation behind the creation of “fake” classical music, written by other but attributed to compsores like Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert.
  2. Considers motivations of writers/compsoers to falsely attribute works, questioning the value of authorship and integrity of the single-author concept.
Reed, Trevor. “Fair Use As Cultural Appropriation,” April 4, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3456164.

why it's here

  1. Argues that fair use aces as a gatekeeping mechanism for unauthorized uses of copyrighted culture. This mechanism empowers courts to sanction or disapprove of cultural appropriations to futher copyright’s goal of promoting creativity.
  2. Claims the “forgotten” factor of fair use is how unauthorized appropriations impact culturally diverse forms of creativity.
Savage, Steve. Bytes and Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age. University of Michigan Press, 2013. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.3432847.

why it's here

  1. Lays out the relationship betwen digital technology and music creation, production, and consumption.
  2. Challenges the relationship between artist and engineer, putting into question traditional musicological notions of authenticity and authorship.
Seeger, Anthony. “Ethnomusicology and Music Law.” Ethnomusicology 36, no. 3 (1992): 345–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/851868.

why it's here

  1. Discusses the relationship between the United States’ intellectual property and entertainment law and those who do not ascribe to the United States’ specific definitions of originality and ownership.
Stanfill, Mel. Rock This Way. University of Michigan Press, 2023. https://press.umich.edu/Books/R/Rock-This-Way2.

why it's here

  1. Analyzes how American culture defines “legitimate” musuc.
  2. Considers what role covers, remixes, and mashups play in this definition.
  3. Argues that race, the law, and creativity shape perceptions of borrowing arguing for their role in white supremacy and questioing what makes something original in the first place.
Zemp, Hugo. “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996): 36–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/767806.

why it's here

  1. first hand notes of ethnomusicologists rights negotiations.

  2. pertaining world music debate and Afunakwa’s rights over recorded voice in Smithsonian collection

Unruly Team

Unruly Hopes

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Next steps, background, where this goes from here.