The 7^th Conference on AI Music Creativity

2026 Theme: The Generative Turn. Mediated Musicianship in a Hyper-reproductive Age

Music has entered a state of hyper-reproduction. AI systems now produce millions of tracks daily and play a growing role in how music is created and experienced. This marks a fundamental reconfiguration of musical practice: music is no longer only composed or improvised, but increasingly "spawned" through interfaces that reshape the relationship between creative intentions, material production, and sonic outcome. Prompts, recommendation pipelines, and datasets influence the reception of both musicians and listeners.

AIMC 2026 considers this turn in terms of both technical infrastructure and cultural transformation. When music is created using AI-mediated tools, such as prompts, steering mechanisms and dataset-driven recombination, what new forms of musicianship, listening and creative agency emerge? How can creativity be understood as distributed across human intuition and machine capacity, enacted through interfaces that both enable and constrain aesthetic possibility? Do these systems produce their own aesthetic signatures — distinctive sonic characteristics or formal tendencies that mark them as generatively produced? Can these systems produce unique aesthetic forms, or do they merely tend towards homogenisation and stylistic flattening? To what degree are these processes really new, and in what ways are they continuations of older ones?

AI systems are progressively becoming embedded within musical processes, functioning as interfaces of mediation through which creative practice is negotiated and materialised, from composition and performance to voice synthesis, mixing and scoring. This shift demands critical inquiry: What forms of attention, evaluation and pedagogy can meaningfully engage with hyperreproductive conditions? How do we confront the deeper structural transformations underway, such as the asymmetries of power between platform infrastructures and creative communities, the politics of dataset extraction and consent, the reconfiguration of musical labour and value, and the ways these systems actively shape musical output and the conditions, practices and possibilities of music-making itself? And who profits from AI produced music?

The AIMC invites submissions on the technical, cultural, social, historical, and legal discourse surrounding these topics, as well as artistic contributions in which AI systems make a creative impact. They can address areas as:

• Performance Practice: technologies of music; gestures, sensors, acoustic environments and prompts; embodied practices; virtuosity.

• Instrument-Human Relations: continuities with historical techniques; reconstruction and replicas; playability and preservation; relationship between musician, interface and instrument; robotics.

• Interpretation: technologies from piano rolls to AI algorithms; authorship, relations between human creativity, improvisation and computational processes; agency, intention and artistic expression.

• Mediated Musicianship and Creative Practice: Composing, performing, and
producing through interfaces; prompt-based composition; steering mechanisms; co-creative
and agentic workflows

• Distributed Agency and Aesthetic Evaluation: Relational creativity across human-
AI systems; questions of singularity and style under generative abundance; critical
frameworks for evaluating AI-mediated music

• Curation & Listening Ecologies: Discovery, overload, detection, metadata futures

• Platform Infrastructures and Emerging Musical Economies: Infrastructural control
and asymmetries; emerging models of compensation and rights; the reconfiguration of
musical labor and value chains

• Authorship, Provenance, and Cultural Identity: Spectral authorship and attribution;
dataset politics and cultural extraction; questions of musical memory, tradition, and
ownership

• Ethics, Governance, and Consent: Dataset provenance and permissions;
accountability in AI music systems; frameworks for ethical development and
deployment

• Pedagogy and Critical Musicianship: Teaching and learning music in post-generative
contexts; new literacies and competencies; cultivating critical engagement with AI-mediated
practice