The rapid rise of AI-generated music has sparked widespread debate around creativity, ethics, and artistic authenticity. Yet, automated composition is far from a modern invention. Long before present-day AI models, Baroque and Classical musicians designed mechanical automata, contrapuntal matrices, and chance-based dice games to mechanize music-making.
The project Who’s Afraid of the ‘Artyfyshall Byrd’? investigates these early modern modes of musical artificiality to offer transhistorical perspectives on modern generative systems. Led by Nicholas Cornia and Bruno Forment at Orpheus Instituut, this research shows how historical artificiality was celebrated as supreme craftsmanship that complemented, rather than replaced, human creativity.
Among the project outputs are a research publication in the Proceedings of the 25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (November 2024), and an interactive dataset: with digitised historical treatises.
