We are a team of researchers from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, Warner School of Education & Human Development, Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, and School of Arts & Sciences, along with Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering collaborating to leverage and better utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to empower musicians to produce and disseminate their art more effectively and independently.

Our project, funded by the National Science Foundation Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, proposes to achieve these goals by working in the following complementary areas:

• Creating an open-access framework enabling musicians and AI researchers to collaborate in developing new music production solutions, which will run on Audacity (an open-source and free DAW that more than two million people have used to date).
• Understanding both advances and challenges that may arise from using AI for music production.
• Providing new learning opportunities to empower current and future musicians to utilize technology better.

Through this project, we aim to increase the democratization of music production by helping musicians become self-sufficient in their music creation. The open-access framework we are developing will also accelerate research in audio engineering by providing a vehicle to effectively deploy and refine new AI models for music production. Insights gained from this project will be relevant for many other occupations at the human-technology frontier besides musicians. Those insights include how to create more ethical and user-friendly AI-powered products, develop the mindsets and skills needed by domain specialists to leverage technology, and understand the implications of the pandemic.