@chriswmwhite.bsky.social
1.3K followers 180 following 95 posts
Music theorist & autism dad. Forthcoming book= The AI Music Problem, Routledge. Sometimes in Slate and the Chicago Tribune. The last King of Rome.
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chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Anybody got a Sora invite they’d like to waste on me?
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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...
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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...
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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:
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Heavy way to start a morning, @mikeduncan.bsky.social, with the fall of the Girondins… I mean fall of the Mons Cafe crowd
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Yeah! To my eye, a lot of this software has either a major mode or (more often in EDM) minor mode default. Taking meter into consideration would add more subtlety!
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
However, if our writing becomes the component of an AI’s dataset, it will—for better or worse—become a perpetual component in the corpus of an LLM. I do not mean to advocate that this is the right way to achieve immortality. But we’ll likely all achieve immortality along this route, nonetheless. END
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
So many of us work hard for most of our waking hours to create scholarship that will mildly influence a handful of other human beings, but our lifetimes of scholarship will be forgotten and disappear like fallen leaves in compost. .. (3/4)
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
In musicology—let alone the myriad subdisciplines slicing smaller and smaller portions of that disciplinary pie—we are lucky if we number our readership in the hundreds, and the citations in the tens. This audience is a microscopic portion of human who are living or will live. ... (2/4)
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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. ...
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Everyone who receives an email from @kevinroose.com this week is going to be wondering whether his #AI wrote it...
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Should @theorymeg.bsky.social and I create an early-music-themes #memecoin called #dufaynance? Yes or no or heck yah
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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...
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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
Reposted
quiresandplaces.com
OK people, let's take it down a notch and calm down with a gentle sleigh ride.

#CursedCarols
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
The 1981 chipmunks Christmas special is among the most underrated holiday content out there.
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
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.
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
Or should I say— thanks to whoever gave that the GREEN LIGHT
chriswmwhite.bsky.social
“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