Professor Ken Ueno has guest-edited a special issue of Sonic Ideas, the journal of CMMAS (Mexican Center for Music and Sound Arts), dedicated to the theme of AI and Music.
The edition features contributions from leading voices including George Lewis, De Kai, Michael Maizels, Damien Charriéras, Gregory Niemeyer, Matthias Röder, Ryo Ikeshiro, Nicola L. Hein, and Viola Yip.
This wide-ranging issue explores the impact of artificial intelligence across contemporary music, offering perspectives that span creative practice, cultural production, and theoretical inquiry.
- Beethoven’s X – leveraging AI to complete unfinished works (Röder)
- Rap and cultural production (Charriéras, De Kai, Maizels)
- Soundscapes (Ikeshiro)
- Ontological stakes of art – what’s lost when causality erodes (Niemeyer)
- AI feedback machines that blur human/algorithmic identity (Hein & Yip)
- Artifacts of postcolonial asymmetry – AI’s mismapping of Cantonese, explored through an essay on the Hong Kong post-punk group N.Y.P.D.’s G.A.I.G.A.I. (Ueno)
- Plus a new interview with George Lewis (Lewis & Ueno)
The issue opens with Ueno’s introduction, which considers how AI unsettles the very grounds of making: “In the age of AI, this becomes a deeper crisis of representation—one in which the observer can no longer trust whether the signs they encounter refer to any grounding reality at all. The uncanny fluency of AI-generated outputs—texts, images, compositions—destabilizes our semiotic bearings. We are no longer simply questioning who authored a work, but whether there is a referent behind the representation in the first place. As Jacques Derrida writes in his theory of iterability, every sign carries within it the possibility of being repeated, cited, or detached from its original context, such that meaning is always deferred, never fully present (Derrida, 1977). AI amplifies this condition to an extreme: it generates signs without origin, without anchoring presence, and yet with all the formal cues of intentionality.
Thus, the AI-generated artifact exists in a suspended state—it is neither wholly simulation nor authentic expression, but a hyper-iterable event: plausible enough to pass as real but unmoored from lived experience or situated meaning. We are no longer dealing with the reproduction of reality, but with a reality continuously recomposed in the image of its representations.”
To read the full issue, click the link below.
https://www.cmmas.com/en/copy-of-ideassonicas-2/ideassonicas%2Fsonicideas-23