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Agency in musical AI: a critical review

A structured review of how agency is defined and used in musical AI research.

Level: Summer research, Honours, Masters
Prerequisites: Strong writing skills and wide reading. Some background in HCI, philosophy, or musicology is helpful.

Researchers describe AI music systems using many competing ideas of agency: mixed-initiative interaction, co-creativity, human-AI teaming, material agency, and agential realism. These frames lead to very different design decisions, but they are rarely compared. In this project you’ll conduct a structured review of how agency is defined and used in musical AI and intelligent instrument research (e.g., in NIME, CHI, and ICCC proceedings), and propose a framework for how the concepts relate. You can build on the lab’s experience running a scoping review (of 199 studies on interactive sonification). The coded corpus you produce is released openly as part of your artefact.

• Summer or one semester: a structured review of a bounded corpus (e.g., NIME papers from 2015 onwards that discuss agency), with a map of agency concepts and where they’re used.
• Two semesters or Master: a full scoping review protocol, and a proposed conceptual framework tested by applying it to existing intelligent instruments.

Tags: #theory #literature-review #agency #human-AI-co-creativity

How to apply

Contact Charles Martin with your CV, your unofficial transcript (if you are an ANU student), and a brief statement (200 words) explaining how you would approach this project. Before applying, read the Join page and our project expectations.