Engineering Art-Ificial Intelligence in Music Production: Art for Engineers, Engineers for Art

Abstract

This study investigates how software engineers working on music AI systems conceptualize music, art, and creativity, and how they integrate artificial intelligence (AI) as a co-creator in music composition processes. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with engineers based in the USA and T & uuml;rkiye, the research explores the values, assumptions, and interpretive frameworks that shape their technical and aesthetic practices. Findings reveal that while engineers often frame AI solely in computational terms, they tend to frame artistic creativity as a quality accessible only to human beings, positioning the human as the creative force in music as an artistic field and juxtaposing AI as a collaborative tool that can be utilized to unleash musical creativity in previously unexplored ways, which represents a new, hybrid form of artistic creativity. However, this collaboration is mediated by engineers' own worldviews, which are often shaped by technocentric, efficiency-driven logics that position AI as a means, leading to a blind faith in technology and ignoring the social forces such as capitalism, imperialism and colonialism embedded in AI. The contribution of this study to the sociology of AI literature is twofold. First, by emphasizing how cultural imaginaries of art and music are being reshaped in the co-production of music, the study provides an understanding of music as a form of art created through human-machine interactions. Second, it critically evaluates how this process of co-creativity reproduces social forces such as capitalism, imperialism and colonialism.