Questions of Voice in AI Music

Abstract

The rise of AI in music and the use of deep fake voices raise questions about authorship, ownership, and copyright. One recent response is that of the Human Artistry Campaign (HAC), who have lobbied for intellectual property protection for the voice. This chapter takes their concerns as a starting point to think about voice and AI. We draw on approaches to the voice and to the circulation of sound in the form of recordings from ethnomusicology and anthropology. In doing so, we highlight that the HAC suggests that “voice” faces an existential crisis due to challenges from AI and trace these concerns to indexical links to identity and human embodiment. Further, we point out the problems with the HAC’s appeal to notions of property in voices. Noting that in robotics synthetic voices are regarded as important interfaces between humans and machines, we make a contrast between different kinds of machine mimesis of human voices. The complexity of AI’s impact on music suggests the need for broader frameworks to address the evolving landscape of musical creativity and ownership. We argue for taking into account underlying cultural assumptions when building such a framework.