Situating Genealogy, Markets, and Tool-Use in Music Authorship
Written on April 10th, 2026 by Brandon Woo SnyderPresentation at Music And AI: Creativity, Labor, and Power hosted by the Music Sustainabiltiy Forum.
Abstract
This paper proposes a theoretical framework for authorship that better reflects the relationships between artists and tools in a work, and situates generative AI within a broader conversation about tool-usage in musical creation. This framework is in four layers: Tool-User, Social-Inscription, Genealogy, and Economic, each identifying a particular aspect of human-tool relationships. The Tool-User and Social-Inscription layers pull on writing by Rama Gottfried and Thor Magnusson to define how authorship has been litigated in over the past 5 decades of sampling and digital instrument design. I then build on Bruno Latour’s writings on tool-human genealogy, as well as Eric Drott’s on machine learning and the musical commons to situate how the economic and political aspects of human-tool relationships intersect with the material of a musical work. I argue that these four layers situate the disclosure of training data as particularly important for how AI tools participate in ethics of authorship.
Slides
