What are you going to do?Generative AI in the past decade has changed the field of artistic creativity, making us ask new questions that are relevant not only for scientific research but also for musicians and artists of all kinds. With this position, we are seeking to broaden our profile with respect to AI-assisted music generation and how AI-generated art can be positioned within the humanities and cognitive science more generally. The explosive growth of creative AI has also brought new ethical and epistemological dimensions to reflect upon, and we are looking for a colleague who can translate this reflection into both teaching and research. The ideal candidate will be somebody comfortable engaging in the ethics and implications of using AI in artistic processes regardless of medium, with more specific expertise in how AI is (and can be) used to make music.
Your base within the teaching department will be the
Musicology group. Your research will be affiliated with the
Music Cognition Group, which is part of the
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC).
The Musicology group is part of the Department of Arts and Culture, a multi-faceted unit that includes bachelor's and master's programmes in art history, theatre, cultural analysis, music studies, and performance research. In addition to Musicology teaching, you will also be involved in the Human and Artificial Intelligence major of a new department-wide BA programme called Global Arts, Culture, and Politics, as well as the department-wide MA programme in Art and Performance Research, an innovative two-year programme for students interested in historical, theoretical and practice-based research in the visual and performing arts. You will be teaching a diverse group of bachelor's students, master's students, and future researchers from music, theatre, artistic research, performance studies, cognition, AI, and the digital humanities.
The Music Cognition Group applies interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, make, and appreciate music and asks what music is for and why every human culture has it, whether musicality is a uniquely human capacity, and what biological and cognitive mechanisms underlie it. The ILLC is one of the five research schools of the
Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research. The ILLC is the leading research institute in the interdisciplinary area dealing with the investigation of information, information exchange, and cognition with formal and mathematical methods. It is deeply rooted in the Amsterdam logic research tradition dating back to the early twentieth century and covers the disciplines of mathematics, music, linguistics, computer science, philosophy and artificial intelligence with staff members from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam.
Tasks and responsibilities:
- designing and conducting independent research on generative AI in music and the performing arts, resulting in academic publications in peer-reviewed international journals and/or books;
- actively pursuing external funding for research, notably funding from research councils, national as well as European;
- actively contributing to and developing national and international research networks and other forms of cooperation;
- actively contributing to the research activities of the ILLC and its Language and Music Cognition unit;
- developing, coordinating, and teaching courses in both Dutch and English, in the Bachelor and Master programmes in Arts and Culture;
- supervising Bachelor and Master theses and tutoring students; co-supervising PhD theses;
- actively contributing to the development and improvement of the broader teaching programmes in the department, with a focus on the new Global Arts, Culture and Politics programme; and
- taking part in committees and working groups, and carrying out departmental administrative tasks as directed.