The Iceland University of the Arts (IUA) is pleased to announce that the European Research Council has awarded Professor Thor Magnusson an ERC Consolidator grant for his project Intelligent Instruments: Understanding 21st-Century AI Through Creative Music Technologies. The research will be hosted at the IUA, where Magnusson has been appointed a Research Professor. Conducted in the domain of music, the project is transdisciplinary with a broad humanities basis. This five-year 2 million Euro research project will consist of a team of postdocs, doctoral researchers and an instrument designer from the fields of music, computer science and philosophy.

 

The project invites experts from a wide range of scientific fields to study creative AI and embodied intelligent instruments through music. The project will develop technologies that interact, learn, and evolve in the hands of the performer and create a collaborative platform to study how our language and discourse adapts to these new methods of making and performing music, for example through changing notions of agency, autonomy, authenticity, authorship, creativity and originality. 

 

Thor Magnusson says:

“It is a great honour to receive this ERC funding for my project. I have been conducting research in computer music and creative AI for over two decades and my interest has increasingly been shifting towards the philosophical impact and meaning of the application of AI in our creative work. What is the language we use when our children draw a stick man on an app and it is rendered in the style of Van Gogh, or a melody they make suddenly has the orchestration of Mahler. As a culture, we lack the understanding of how this is done and the language to discuss, evaluate, and contribute to a critique of these new technologies. These are not simple questions and there is no single scientific field that can answer them. Therefore, I have developed a project of interdisciplinary collaboration with experts in music, philosophy, cognitive science, computer science and sociology, using musical instruments as a focal point to explore these topics. My research team will develop the instruments, they will be used and we will create a platform for the general public to develop the language and discourse needed to properly discuss the advent of AI in our work. The project is properly interdisciplinary with a strong humanistic basis, but it is grounded in music and I felt that the Iceland University of the Arts was the optimal place to run this project.”

 

According to their mission statement, the ERC supports the best of the best in Europe across all fields of science, scholarship and engineering. It promotes wholly investigator-driven, or 'bottom-up' frontier research and seeks to encourage the work of the established and next generation of independent top research leaders in Europe. The ERC rewards innovative proposals by placing emphasis on the quality of the idea rather than the research area, thereby aspiring to raise the status and visibility of European frontier research and the very best researchers of today and tomorrow. (Source/link: https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/mission)

 

The rector of the Iceland University of the Arts, Fríða Björg Ingvarsdóttir, says 

"The grant is obviously an enormous achievement for Thor Magnusson and his academic career. The acknowledgment of the importance of research in the realm of the arts is no less an accomplishment and reflects the palpable importance of this contemporary field of study. Not only in this country, but in Europe as a whole, where artistic research has rapidly expanded” says Fríða Björk Ingvarsdóttir, rector of the Iceland University of the Arts. “ Art in its essence, spans all topics that characterise human thought and behaviour, also when it comes to research. The power of the arts throughout the centuries has always been defined by its investigation into the core of humanity; of that which propels our understanding, intellect and societal development forward. This is also applies to our situation in contemporay times. Consequently,Magnusson‘s  research is an excellent example of the far-reaching implications and interdisciplinary approach of artistic endeavours, whether in the form of the creative process itself or research objectives.

 

Professor Magnusson is an expert on intelligent technologies, with a background in music, philosophy, computer science and AI. He has developed music software, performed, given workshops and written tutorials on computer music. His book, Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions, was recently published by Bloomsbury Academic, and in the past years he has been working on the MIMIC research project (Musically Intelligent Machines Interacting Creatively - www.mimicproject.com). He is currently Head of the Music Department at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and will now split his time between Iceland and the UK.

 

Further information on the ERC website: ECR

 
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