On AI and human-led composition in the concert hall
- peter-relph
- Aug 6
- 2 min read
There’s been a constant stream of articles and discussion about the continuing spread of AI and its effect on the creative industries. Debate about the opportunities of new AI tools are counterbalanced by concerns about the threat of job displacement for composers.[1]
The likelihood is that going forward it will become difficult to impossible to tell the difference between music composed by AI and music composed by human beings. And there are also emerging hybrid formats – AI tools used by humans to aid their own creative process - which will further blur these distinctions and render them increasingly meaningless.
For those of you who favour human-led creativity: classical music concerts are still and (I expect) will remain a haven. This is based on a few factors:
There is already a strong bias in musical programming towards music written by historic composers. In the UK, for instance, Bachtrack calculated that just 15.28% of all programmed music by orchestras and large venues was written by living composers in 2024, leaving more than 80% for historical repertoire.[2] That means even if a significant bandwidth of ‘new’ music was written by AI, most of the music heard would still have been written by a human being.
There is a marked bias against fully AI composed music amongst audiences. In the academic study ‘AI composer bias: Listeners like music less when they think it was composed by an AI’, participants “liked the music less when it was purportedly composed by an AI”, shown across three different studies.[3]
There is a small but steady increase in interest in performing works by living composers globally, borne out through analysis of classical music programming.[4]
The creative opportunities unlocked by AI are endless - everything from new timbres and forms to using audience inputs to alter how a composition progresses in real time. Breakthroughs in emerging technologies offer the opportunity for real innovation in music concerts and composition. However, it would seem that, in the immediate future at least, AI will likely continue to have a guiding human hand.
PWR 2025.
Comments