Rethinking the A and I of AI: Of Music, Mind, Mechanism, and Machine
Organized by the AMS Committee on the Annual Meeting and Public Events (CAMPE).
In a 1991 conversation with Otto Laske about music and machines, Marvin Minsky proposes a restraint: “When I write about some mechanism of intelligence or learning, I try not to use words like ‘intelligence’ and ‘learning’—except in the title or summary.” What does Minsky want by isolating these terms, and what remains to write about? The answer is mechanism—a mechanism of mind to generate music with or without a machine. The relationship between music, mind, mechanism, and machine is my subject here. Taking a genealogical approach, I trace the promotion and demotion of words for “intelligence” and “learning,” separating productive tensions from extreme anxieties surrounding what humanity has invented. I keep returning to Minsky’s opening line about terms and titles, reaching my reading of the Laske conversation only at the end. At stake is music’s mediation through production: its ways of being sounded out by a body, instrument, or processor. When music sounds, it floats or streams. Floating connotes a freedom of movement borne on the wings of song; streaming today suggests a standardized spread. From the imaginary museum of musical works, we arrive at the museum without walls, to ask what remains, if anything, of music’s extension c[h]ords.