Report on AI Research from the 2025 Society for Ethnomusicology Conference

At this year’s Society for Ethnomusicology conference in Atlanta, scholars presented a diverse set of approaches to understanding artificial intelligence’s new entanglement with music. It confirmed how ethnomusicologists are well positioned to think through the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of technological change. 

In the session “AI and Ownership and Fieldwork Considerations,” presenters examined AI as a cultural agent that raises questions of authorship, labor, race, and power. David Hebert and Matthew Day Blackmar explored how legal and economic structures around copyright are being reshaped by generative systems, highlighting tensions between human creativity and algorithmic production. Darci Sprengel’s work on the Arab music industry reframed AI as a socio-technical practice embedded within postcolonial economies, while Katherine Miner’s analysis of synthetic voices and virtual performers interrogated how AI reconfigures notions of humanity and affect in popular music. León García Corona took another tack, extending the discussion pedagogically, suggesting that “data-driven ethnomusicology” can serve as a decolonial and collaborative mode of inquiry, inviting students to engage critically with AI as both a research method and an object of study. 

Taken together, these perspectives underscore how ethnomusicologists, grounded in theories of cultural production and lived experience, are carving out a distinctive space in broader AI discourse, one that centers relationality, embodiment, and the global politics of sound. In addition to these research presentations, the editor of Ethnomusicology informally reported a surge of AI-related submissions to the journal, signaling a rapidly expanding field of inquiry into the cultural consequences of large language models and generative technologies.