I’m sitting in my office, listening to the noisy ventilation system that inspired my AMBIENT project. Here is a short sample: At the moment, I am primarily focusing on completing my book Still Standing. However, as part of my year-long #StillStanding project, I have also started thinking about the sounds found in indoor environments. Asking ChatGPT for help I have yet to begin a proper literature review on ventilation noise, but as a start, I asked ChatGPT for help.

There has been much discussion about ChatGPT recently, a chat robot that can write meaningful answers to questions. I haven’t had time to test it out properly, and it was unavailable when I wanted to check it today. Instead, I have played around with YouWrite, a service that can write text based on limited input. I thought it would be interesting to ask it to write about something I know well, so I asked it to write a text based on an abbreviated version of the abstract of my new book:

What are the digital competencies needed in the future? Our head of department has challenged me to talk about this topic at an internal seminar today. Here is a summary of what I said. Competencies vs skills First, I think it is crucial to separate competencies from skills. The latter relates to how you do something. There has been much focus on teaching skills, mainly teaching people how to use various software or hardware.

Or, more specifically: can AI replace an artist? That is the question posed in a short documentary that I have contributed to for this year’s Research Days. We were contacted before summer about trying to create a new song based on the catalogue of the Norwegian artist Ary. The idea was to use machine learning to generate the song. This has turned out to be an exciting project. I was busy finishing the manuscript for my new book, so I wasn’t much involved in the development part myself.

Last week I was interviewed about music and artificial intelligence (AI). This led to several different stories on radio, TV, and as text. The reason for the sudden media interest in this topic was a story by The Guardian on the use of deep learning for creating music. They featured an example of the creation of Sinatra-inspired music made using a deep learning algorithm: After these stories were published, I was asked about participating in a talk-show on Friday evening.

I recently mentioned that I have been busy setting up the new MCT master’s programme. But I have been even more busy with preparing the startup of our new Centre of Excellence RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. This is a large undertaking, and a collaboration between researchers from musicology, psychology and informatics. A visual “abstract” of the centre can be seen in the figure to the right.

Douglas Hofstadter is discussing music and artificial intelligence: Back when I was young – when I wrote “Gödel, Escher, Bach” – I asked myself the question “Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?”, and then proceeded to speculate as follows: “There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs… To think – and I have heard this suggested – that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model ‘music box’ to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit.