From AI to 4E: A Reflective Turn in Musicology to Overcome Dualist, Romantic and Cognitivist Prejudices

As AI-generated music becomes more and more credible and refined every passing year, the centrality and role of human artists are apparently doomed to be redefined. Music (and generalist) journalism tends to nourish alarmist narrations and gather hype around the newest findings in AI-generated music and their supposedly threatening consequences, but in doing so it is implicitly suggested that the peculiar ways in which human creativity works can be compared with the way algorithms and programs work, not unlike many radically reductionist philosophies of mind do. In this presentation, I argue that this moment of cultural (and existential) crisis of human artistry constitutes a chance to leave behind old cartesian (mind-body dualism), cognitivist (mind as machine) and romantic (rhetoric of geniality) that still condition the common understanding of music. The role of musicology should be one of bringing people closer to a conception of music as an embodied practice, in dialogue with philosophy of mind, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and the so-called “4E cognition” (embodied-extended-embedded-enacted) theories in particular. If we avoid betraying the essence of music by reducing it to purely abstract, disembodied and formalizable, it becomes clearer why we should regard artificial creativity as an occasion, rather than a threat – an occasion to trigger a reflective turn in musicology: reflecting on the challenges brought forth by AI-generated music and on how it works, then, can help understand what makes human creativity so special.