Earlier today, I wrote about AI and photography based on an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo. During the Q&A session, a musician in the audience said that he felt that the AI systems he had tried behaved so properly and asked if an AI can be “drunk” and whether we could “pour some alcohol into the machine” to make it a little freer and less “stiff” in its creative output. That is a very interesting question, hence this little reflection. ...
Today, I took part in an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo in connection with the exhibition What We Call Real by Camila Urrego. This was the first time they had invited a photographer to exhibit works explicitly made “with AI,” and I was invited to contribute thoughts on the potential of AI for creative practice (in this case, photography). As MishMash picks up speed, I receive many requests for talks and panels on AI and creativity, and I try to say yes when I can make it. I have found this to be an excellent way to think about various AI use cases outside my core focus areas and to meet interesting people. Here are some thoughts based on my preparatory notes and reflections after the event. ...
Many musicians rely on basic tools in everyday life, including a tuner, a metronome, and a keyboard. I support the kids in a marching band, and I see that they rely on numerous poorly developed apps that differ between iOS and Android devices. Many of them also include ads, and some even play video ads in the middle of a tuning session. I wanted to see if I could develop some web-based apps to solve the problem. ...
Yesterday, I wrote about the history and future of AI in general. Today, I am continuing my explorations by examining the role of AI in the arts and the impact of the arts on AI. The exploration is based on this notebook, with 60 sources collected by NotebookLM. AI in the Arts AI has a multi-generational history in the arts, transitioning from centuries-old mechanical automatons to symbolic rule-making and eventually to deep learning-based approaches. In the following, I will go through some of the works picked out by NotebookLM. Some of them I know well, others I hadn’t heard about before. A complete list of detected works is at the end of the post. ...
Due to MishMash, I am nowadays lecturing on AI, music, and creativity several times a week. I usually include a brief overview of machine learning history, mainly to explain that ChatGPT didn’t come out of nowhere but was the result of decades of research. To check that my story holds and to get a few more critical years and names in place. This blog post summarizes the brief history of AI to date. ...
Yesterday, I wrote about how I cleaned up a lot of old mess here on this blog. This made me realize that I have not paid attention to creating alt text for all my images, that is, descriptive text that describes the content of the image. That is an enormous job when you have several thousand images on a blog like this. So I decided to ask CoPilot for help. Getting AI help CoPilot first suggested creating alt text based on the image file names. That could have been a good idea if the filenames had been descriptive. However, they are not (in general), hence I asked for a solution that would actually analyse the content of the images. After a series of iterations, we (CoPilot and I) ended up with a Python script that does the job. ...
After running this blog for over two decades, it was time for some serious housekeeping. I converted from WordPress to Hugo some years ago, but never had time to do a proper cleanup. Then, the focus was on conversion and making it work. Now, with the help of GitHub Copilot, I finally got around to cleaning up the technical debt that had accumulated across several thousand posts. The Scale of the Challenge This blog currently contains more than 2000 English posts and 200 Norwegian posts, spanning from 2000 to 2025. In the beginning, I wrote HTML code manually, then moved on to server-side includes, then to WordPress, and now to Hugo. Throughout those years, I have changed themes and explored new web standards as they have evolved. That history shows in the inconsistencies that have built up in the content. ...
This semester, I have written a book with AI. I should emphasize the with in the previous sentence, because this has been an experience of co-creation between various large language models (LLMs) and me. This post details my approach to co-writing Sensing Sound and Music and reflects on the process. The need for a book The reason for my AI-based writing experiment was the need for a textbook for the course MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music at the University of Oslo. This is an introductory course for the bachelor’s students in our musicology program who want to major in music psychology and/or music technology. These are two distinct directions that are usually taught separately. However, at UiO, we have a strong tradition of combining psychological and technological perspectives on and with music (in the fourMs Lab and at RITMO), so I have argued that we need a foundation course showing the connections between the two disciplines. ...
One of my MUS2640 students asked which AI tool I had used to create the illustration on top of the textbook I have been developing for the course. The fact is, it isn’t AI-generated; it is a photo! I took the photo holding a 360-degree camera on my head while visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) a couple of years ago. I was standing inside Olafur Eliasson’s One-way colour tunnel, located on a bridge inside the gallery. It is a fascinating three-dimensional light sculpture that no photo could capture. However, the 360-degree photo gives an impression of what it looks like: ...
While writing the blog post on AI-realistic photos, I wanted to include one of my 360-degree photos. In the past, I have done this by embedding code snippets from commercial services. However, those tend to disappear or move, so I wanted to check (again) if I can do it natively on my own server instead. And, lo and behold, now, in 2025, it is finally possible to do this easily with regular web tools! ...