Author: kaileyw2b28cd8d77

Does AI write music as well as humans?

Kailey Watson, Arts, Culture and Sports Reporter

Udio, an AI music generator and tool. (Kailey Watson, The New Feed NRV)

Many professionals in the creative technologies field have begun to explore artificial intelligence’s possible utilizations in music, although the scope has yet to be seen.

AI has made its way into seemingly all sectors of life, music being no outlier. Applications like Udio and Suno have arisen to turn written prompts into audible representations at the push of a button. There are positive applications of such software, such as assisting in co-creation and acting as an artistic tool, but there also lies the potential to strip away what some argue music is meant to be about.

Ivica Ico Bukvic has been a professor in Media Arts and Production and the inaugural Director of the Kinetic Immersion and Extended Reality (KIX) Lab at Indiana University since August of 2025. Before this, he worked at Virginia Tech for 19 years and notably is the founder and director of the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio and the World’s first Linux-based Laptop Orchestra.

Bukvic also developed L20k Tweeter, which came into being during the Coronavirus pandemic, to bring people together by making music over the internet that could be in sync and co-created. The program encourages collaboration over any distance and differs from the traditional method of the composer and performer.

Bukvic is now looking to infuse the system with an AI co-performer and co-creator to explore how it can create a sense of comfort for those joining the group for the first time. Thus making them feel encouraged to keep playing by feeling less alone.

“Now AI becomes the connecting tissue, rather than something that steals away the creativity from humans,” Bukvic said.

Bukvic is a strong believer in the benefits of creating music, no matter the amount of training one has. “Music was always this thing that was created by humans to bring us together, to celebrate, to enjoy each other’s company, etc.,” Bukvic said. “So if we were to replace that co-creation with something that is generated through AI, in some ways, we are robbing the humanity of the elements that bring us together.” 

Eric Lyon is a composer, computer musician, spatial music researcher, audio software developer, curator and professor at Virginia Tech. His work with technological applications in music began at a very young age, his first trial being recording himself playing the violin and then playing alongside this recording, a practice not unlike what’s being developed today.

Eric Lyon, performing on the computer. (Courtesy of Eric Lyon)

Amongst his many compositions, Lyon also researches ways to enhance music technologies, including publicly available software FFTease, written with Christopher Penrose, and LyonPotpourri, collections of externals written for Max/MSP and Pd.

A survey by Qodo, an AI coding platform, reported that 82% of software developers use AI coding tools daily or weekly, but 65% say it misses relevant context during critical tasks. A similar sentiment is shared by Lyon.

“I haven’t gotten to the point where I could coach the audio programming to be as good as the kind of code that I wrote 25 years ago,” Lyon said. However, he expects it to be within five years based on the strides that it is continually making.


AI has a ways to go in music composition as well. Lyon shared an example where he asked a music AI, either Udio or Suno, to write a song about the atomic bomb. The result was a cheerful tune about nuclear war, not particularly befitting for the subject matter, but something that he shared he would never have been able to come up with. A snippet of the song would become part of a piece of his. 

As these AI tools stand now, Lyon noted, they do not make very good music on their own. An example he shared was of an AI that was trained on every Beatles song, and then asked to create the next 50 Beatles songs. The result was mediocre, “Not even close to the worst Beatles song,” Lyon shared. This being said, it’s unclear how AI will continue to progress, and if it is possible for this threshold for good music to be reached.

There are already AI musicians breaching into platforms like Spotify, but whether this will become the future is yet to be known. Lyon argues that there has always been a deskilling aspect to music, such as how all keyboardists used to know how to read figured bass. AI could be another step in removing areas of knowledge that are no longer seen as necessary. An extreme would be that no one has the skills to compose a piece, and music is generated simply by the push of a button.

“AI is kind of an amputation, but it feels a little bit more like brain surgery,” Lyon said. 

Bukvic begs the question, “Why would you use AI to remove what was the, arguably, primary motivation for having such an activity in place in the first place?” He instead looks to the notion of co-agency, a concept in which he currently has pending projects.

He aims to develop his own AI collaborator that is trained on important parameters to assist in the process of co-creation. He shares that it could assist in live performances, as there are only so many things one can juggle in one’s mind at once, and only so many hands to carry out said things.

Lyon’s AI-related projects are titled “Eric, this is so you coded,” a whole piece coded by AI, and “How I learned to stop worrying and love the hallucinations,” a work about how AI malfunctions and gives false information. Lyon shared his goal with this piece is to answer the question, “How can you make AI worse rather than better in ways that are artistically interesting?” 

AI certainly has applications in music, though whether its trajectory lies in assisting artists or becoming them will be answered with time.

“How do you create a Beethoven and then make that Beethoven make music?” Lyon said. “I mean, we’ve got 32 piano sonatas. If you could make a Beethoven and you could get 32,000, would they all be as great?”

Helping good music live on: Geoff White on music of the Civil War

By Kailey Watson, Arts, Culture and Sports reporter

Geoff White, musician and historian. (Courtesy of Geoff White)

Geoff White is a lifelong musician whose talents found their calling in Civil War-era music. Through reenactment events and lectures, White shares tunes of the time with all who will come to listen.

After moving to Virginia in 2007, he and his wife began participating in civil war reenactments. White brought his fiddle, and his journey began by wanting to have more songs to play around the campfire. He would later receive a Bachelor’s in History in 2013 from Radford University, where he was employed, and worked on studies dealing with music from the Civil War. From there, White began performing combined concerts and lectures from battlefields to retirement homes. 

The following questions and answers were edited slightly for length and clarity.

How do you find the Civil War-era songs that you’re playing?

The Civil War was a unique period in history because so many of the people who fought it from the bottom up, the privates and the rankers, were literate. So we had this explosion of literacy, people being able to write letters and diaries and accounts, but you also have that same thing with musical literacy. Music was much more for the masses, and not just passed down through the oral tradition. 

As far as what we call Parlor Music, a lot of that is readily available. Another avenue would be the music that was printed and distributed to the musicians who were in the army. You also had people going around documenting and recording what musicians were playing. In some cases, it can be very difficult to find just how old this tune is or how new this tune is. 

There’s also another avenue, which would be during the Depression. The Works Progress Administration went around to people who were former slaves and said, we need to document what these people have to say about the lives they led before nobody is alive who remembers it at all. They’re what we call the slave narratives. 

In some cases, they also had people singing songs that they actually recorded with a tape recorder. They were very, very young when these things were happening. But at least they have primary sources.

Have you noticed any difference in being able to find music from one side or the other? 

No, I don’t think there’s any sort of difficulty on one side or the other. There’s plenty available on both sides, or neutral. Just songs that both sides enjoyed, because when it comes down to it, it’s Americans fighting Americans.

As far as picking and choosing, I try to present songs from both sides of the war. Not to express any sort of bias or sentiment towards one side or the other, but to put it in a historical context. 

What were these songs typically about?

It could be about anything, because these soldiers were people. They were normal, common people. 

Sometimes they’re singing about battles. There was an old song called “The Mockingbird,” where the soldiers repurposed it to be about the siege of Vicksburg, and they’re talking about the parrot shells whistling through the air. 

There are a lot of songs about food. I mean, it’s fundamental for existence, right? So why not sing about food? You had songs about the beans that they ate, or about goober peas.

There’s love, like Lorena, a song about a lost love.

I thought about this a lot when the pandemic happened. There was this sentiment that I heard over and over again. It was, “when this is over.” When the pandemic’s over. There was a refrain and a civil war song, “when this cruel war is over, when this war is over,” there’s always this, let’s just get past this. So there was a sentiment that I’ve seen and sort of experienced when we went through this life-changing, traumatic event of the pandemic.  

They were looking back or saying, this sucks. We want to look ahead. You know, to win, so all this crap is done. 

It was a very hyperbolic time. It was a time when people spoke and wrote very passionately about what they were experiencing. So you see that reflected in a lot of the media and in the books and the literature and, of course, the music. You know, they were wax poetic in a way that we don’t do exactly right now about anything and everything under the sun.

For your lectures and events, do you speak solely about the history of the songs, or do you also include general history?

I’m talking about the history of the song, but in some cases, the song has a story to tell beyond just who wrote it, when it was about and what was happening in the world. 

I do a tune called the Spanish Waltz, which you might have heard at West Point. The education for these up-and-coming officers was not just to be an officer. These men were expected to move through the higher echelons of society without embarrassing themselves, their unit and the US Army. They were trained how to eat properly at a formal dinner. How to dance properly. 

There might be a problem that you foresee when you have a single sex school. How do you teach the men to dance? Well, half the men have to wear an armband, so they learned the ladies’ part of the dance. And so that’s an interesting way of thinking about what it would have looked like then at the US Military Academy. I use the Spanish Waltz as a way of talking about that. Now I’m going to play the Spanish Waltz, and you can let your imagination run wild.

What is the importance of keeping the music of this time alive?

My first response is, just because it’s good music. I don’t want to see that die on the vine. These songs and these musicians deserve to be remembered in some way. 

Another thing is that when we learn about the Civil War in a very immersive environment, like a reenactment, one of the things that helps contribute is hearing the music. That can help transport you back in time, just like going to the symphony and hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can transport you back to when people were listening to that kind of music. 

It’s one thing to read about history. It’s another thing to smell history right at a reenactment, and holy cow, well, you smell history. You can taste history. You can hear history when talking about the music. So that’s my stock and trade, hearing history.