Folk the Algorithms: (Mis)Applying Artificial Intelligence to Folk Music

Abstract

This chapter motivates the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to modeling styles of folk music. In this context, we focus particularly on questions about the meaningful evaluation of such AI, and argue that music practitioners should be integral to the research pursuit. We ground our discussion in specific music AI that model symbolic transcriptions of traditional dance music of Ireland and Scandinavia. Finally, we discuss several ethical dimensions of such work.