Babak M. Khoshroo

In this article, I introduce the concept of interpretational creativity (IC), a form of creativity in human artistic activity that has been neglected by discussions of AI creativity. IC, which I describe in relation to Persian traditional music and a few more art traditions, involves creating a new artwork that exhibits a novel relationship to a body of traditional content. Because IC is different from and orthogonal to other forms of creativity, specifically those discussed by Margaret A. Boden in relation to AI, I offer a new analysis of the capacity of generative AI systems to exhibit IC. Based on a technical understanding of how dominant generative AI models learn to produce artistic products, I argue that IC poses an acute challenge related to the need to master extensive cultural context and relationships that are not always descriptively articulable. Regarding the implications of my arguments for the broader problem of AI creativity, I argue that although that challenge can be considered as related to processing contextual information by AI systems, the problem, at a deeper level, concerns the lack of a capacity in AI to adopt a value-laden, cultural, and perspectival stance and to reflect on a tradition.

In this article, I introduce the concept of interpretational creativity (IC), a form of creativity in human artistic activity that has been neglected by discussions of AI creativity. IC, which I describe in relation to Persian traditional music and a few more art traditions, involves creating a new artwork that exhibits a novel relationship to a body of traditional content. Because IC is different from and orthogonal to other forms of creativity, specifically those discussed by Margaret A. Boden in relation to AI, I offer a new analysis of the capacity of generative AI systems to exhibit IC. Based on a technical understanding of how dominant generative AI models learn to produce artistic products, I argue that IC poses an acute challenge related to the need to master extensive cultural context and relationships that are not always descriptively articulable. Regarding the implications of my arguments for the broader problem of AI creativity, I argue that although that challenge can be considered as related to processing contextual information by AI systems, the problem, at a deeper level, concerns the lack of a capacity in AI to adopt a value-laden, cultural, and perspectival stance and to reflect on a tradition.

In this dissertation, I address two questions about auditory and musical experience: (1) How can music (a set of organized sounds) be heard as expressive of emotions such as sadness or happiness? (2) How are sounds (not limited to musical sounds) and their sources related to each other? Regarding the first question, my focus is on the experience of musical expression: what it is like to experience music as cheerful or anxious, for example. I argue that our so experiencing music is based on experiencing a feeling while attending to the relevant qualities of an expressive piece or passage of music. I suggest that to hear the flow and continuity of music, we feel an inner movement, and this feeling sometimes leads us to attribute emotions to music. This is a version of a so-called arousal theory of musical expression, but a merit of my proposal compared with previously defended arousal and cognitive views is that it can explain better how attending to musical properties results in hearing music as expressive. The second question of the dissertation relates to the problem of how when we hear sounds, we hear them as being of things and events in our surroundings (we can hear, for example, the sound of a metal bar being struck, a wooden door being knocked, a violin being bowed, and so on). How should we explain this relation between a sound and the thing it is a sound of? I argue that a sound is a property of an object and the event it participates in to make that sound. In other words, a sound is a complex property instantiated by an object and the relevant (sonic) event. For example, when I hear the sound of a violin being bowed, I hear properties of the instrument and properties of the bowing of the instrument’s strings in that sound. An advantage my theory has, particularly over the event and property theories of sound in the literature, is that it can explain more convincingly how sounds give us perceptual access to the things and events they are sounds of. I will also sketch a future research direction based on applying my theory of sound to explore the content of musical experience, what we hear by hearing musical sounds in a piece of music.