From Automata to AI: A History of Machines That Make Music

Long before modern artificial intelligence could generate songs from text prompts, musicians and inventors sought to mechanize the creative process. From 17th-century musical calculating devices like Athanasius Kircher’s "Musical Ark," or arca musarithmica, to 18th-century dice games, player pianos, and early computer algorithms, history is rich with attempts to codify musical invention into mechanical rules. In this course, we examine this evolution across the centuries, from roughly 1650 to the present. Rather than treating AI as a sudden technological revolution, we explore it as the latest chapter in a long history of mechanizing musical thought. Along the way, we examine the cultural, philosophical, and technological ideas behind these innovations while listening to compositions by humans, machines, and increasingly, collaborations between the two. We conclude with a critical look at what modern generative AI reveals about creativity, authorship, and the future of music. This course will be recorded. Students will have access to videos for the duration of the course.