Sam Miller

This paper asks what kind of creative subject is constituted by the default consumer path of text-to-audio generators such as Suno and Udio, in which a prompt yields a finished song. Peter-Paul Verbeek’s postphenomenology describes the mediation precisely: unlike a traditional instrument in an embodiment relation, the platform is addressed as a quasi-other whose output is then read and appraised. Verbeek’s human-world-technology analysis is accurate but lacks a criterion for what is unmusical in this mediation. The paper takes Heidegger’s Sorge, read through the ecstatic temporality of Being and Time, to test whether a design leaves the user inside an unfinished musical present. Music makes the test unusually clear, because it is given as temporal flow: retention of what has just sounded, impression of the sounding now, and protention of the next phrase. A prompt-to-song file arrives already closed, collapsing the temporal stretch characteristic of music making. However, other mediations such as stem-separation, uploaded performance augmentation, and automated mixing and mastering can leave this temporal field open. The design implication is modest: the default path should not unlock a releasable song from text alone.

Generative AI music platforms (e.g., Suno, Udio) and viral chart-topping AI-generated tracks (e.g., "Walk My Walk") have sparked industry upheaval and ontological questions: What is real music in the age of algorithmic creation? This paper applies Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate AI music’s implications. Drawing on The Origin of the Work of Art, authentic music emerges as poiesis: truth-disclosure (aletheia) through Dasein’s strife between world and earth—requiring lived thrown-projection and historical situatedness. Fully AI-generated music, by contrast, exemplifies Enframing (Gestell): reducing creativity to calculative optimization and standing-reserve, fostering inauthentic “idle talk” (Das Man). Yet Heidegger’s “saving power” suggests reflection on this danger may provoke a turning: recentering music on performative unconcealment while subordinating AI as techne. Engaging Iain Thomson’s recent book, the paper argues generative AI threatens authenticity but harbors promise for rediscovering music’s world-disclosing essence.