Uneasy Listening: Towards a Hauntology of AI-Generated Music

AI music’s mordant fidelity to the past makes it a fitting successor to a short-lived musical movement from the mid-2000s called sonic hauntology. Initially incubated by lively online conversations between leftist academics, journalists, and avant-garde music aficionados, sonic hauntology was a micro-genre of eccentric bedroom producers, outré experimentalists, sound collagists, and left-field club DJs. Artists such as Burial, The Caretaker, The Advisory Circle, and Moon Wiring Club composed what Mark Fisher, the late critic and most prominent theorist of sonic hauntology, fittingly called a “hauntological zeitgeist.”⁶

As Fisher and others argued, the disturbing resonances elicited by sonic hauntology’s plundering of the recorded past provided a stark contrast to postmodernism’s obfuscation of history’s political thickness. Music was made strange and uncanny by sonic hauntology’s techniques of stitching, superimposing, and redirecting discordant trajectories from music’s cultural timeline—putting different eras of recorded history back together in ways that destabilized their legibility. While techniques of mashing up and remixing could hardly be said to originate from sonic hauntology, its artists nonetheless used sampling technology to sample the past in ways that were more critical and transgressive than their contemporaries.

Sonic hauntology’s critical rejoinder to the superficial eclecticism that dominated the 2000s airwaves, I argue, is most acutely reflected today in AI-generated music. Thus, I intend to demonstrate how AI music inherits sonic hauntology’s trenchant critique of postmodernity while advancing its critical aesthetic project in new ways. By foregrounding the temporal ruptures and logical discontinuities that postmodernism merely glosses over, AI music provides an alternative to late capitalist culture’s shallow remixes of the sonic past. Most importantly, AI music executes its critique not by thematizing or symbolizing history’s temporal disjunctures, but by enacting them directly through its medium’s very technical operations. In other words, AI music’s uneasylistening experience is effectuated at the algorithmic level. It originates from the substrates of its computational processes and the temporal fluxes they initiate.

The encounter between advanced technology and the archival past elicits what Mark Fisher referred to as a “technological uncanny.”⁷ While Fisher never fully explained its meaning, I argue that his otherwise brief reference to the technological uncanny makes up the core of sonic hauntology’s efficacy as an unnerving and unstable sonic form. Moreover, it is AI-generated music that bears the greatest potential to reinitiate the spectral energies of sonic hauntology and its technological uncanny once again. Using deep learning algorithms, neural nets, and other computational methods to appropriate the sonic archive, AI music resituates sonic hauntology’s technological uncanny within a contemporary context that is dominated by public anxiety over AI’s increasing power and ubiquity. From its impending takeover of the service industry to its total surveillance of the global population, today’s political and cultural environment is inundated with stories of artificial intelligence and its ruthless exploitation of labor, social discourse, and even consciousness itself. The data industries are more than happy to oblige the public’s perception of AI’s omnipotence, further inculcating digital capitalism’s techno-ideological supremacy. But I argue that its application to music production provides an opportunity to momentarily loosen the grip it otherwise exercises over the body politic and its collective imagination.⁸ As I will demonstrate, AI music’s uneasy listening carries the capacity to estrange its listeners from artificial intelligence’s exclusive articulation to capital accumulation, and opens a doorway to imagine it for alternative uses in an alternative world.

In September of 2016, Sony Music’s research and development division unveiled its latest attempt to create AI-assisted music compositions. Commissioning the tech company Flow Machines, Sony embarked on a mission to create brand-new songs that mimicked the styles of its artists’ back catalogues. Their first AI production, “Daddy’s Car,”⁹ composed in the style of classic Beatles-esque pop. was surprisingly convincing—even disarmingly catchy. On their website, the song’s creators explain how their compositions impersonate real artists by “turning music style into a computational object.”¹⁰ As they elaborate, “[m]usical style can come from individual composers, for example Bach or the Beatles, or a set of different artists, or, of course, the style of the musician who is using the system.”¹¹ In other words, Flow Machines uses AI to translate the supposed uniqueness of human expression into a predictive algorithm. Importantly, its resulting output is not intended to recreate a group’s style wholesale, but to mimic their stylistic signature to create new compositions that sound like them. The song “Daddy's Car,” for instance, doesn't reproduce the actual sound of the Beatles. Thus, the AI program does not delve into the sonic archives to granularly recreate the period-specific sound of the Beatles. “Daddy's Car” doesn't attempt to simulate the sound of George Harrison’s jangly guitar riffs or John Lennon’s bluesy vocal style. It doesn’t recreate the engineering techniques of producer George Martin or utilize the vintage amplifiers one may have found at Abbey Road Studios circa 1965. Its recording quality and instrumentation sound decidedly like middle-of-the-road contemporary pop-rock. This is because rather than creating a perfect copy of classic Beatles music, the purpose of Flow Machines is to collect meta-information about the Beatles' songwriting style and run it through its algorithmic machines. The end result is less a singular object than a generic template for future music products that Sony undoubtedly intends to sell to the Beatles' fanbase.¹²

Unlike Sony’s attempt to harness AI to remonetize its back catalogue, the technology has also been picked up by the underground music scene for more creative endeavors. For instance, the music-programming duo Dadabots produced their album Coditany of Timeness¹³ by training their custom-designed neural network with the album Diotima¹⁴ from New York metal band Krallice. The result was an entirely new set of artificially generated songs that drastically reformulated Krallice’s brand of brooding black metal. Unlike Flow Machines, Dadabots use their AI program to materially alter previously recorded media (i.e., vinyl, tape, or even wav files) and transform them into entirely new compositions. In this way, against Sony's more vulgar opportunism, Dadabots’ integration of AI faithfully follows the path of underground electronic music’s countercultural tradition of reappropriating source material (with or without the creator’s consent) by remixing or mashing it up. But despite their differences, critical reactions to both have been remarkably similar.

In fact, attitudes toward AI music have been consistent dating all the way back to its very earliest incarnations. For instance, UC Santa Cruz professor David Cope’s pioneering experiments in AI were so convincing that his productions both alarmed and enraged his university colleagues and the classical music community at large. He began developing his own automated music program named Emmy all the way back in the early 1980s. As a precursor to Sony's experiments in AI music, Emmy’s debut release, Bach By Design,¹⁵ was unanimously condemned by colleagues who were aghast at his blasphemous usage of AI to score new classical compositions. Offering a recent retrospective of Cope’s work, columnist Tim Adams notes how when listening to Cope’s Emmy program, “you are discomfited and surprised in equal measure…Cope's work is far more than copying, it carries the recognisable DNA of the original style and fashions it into something recognisable but entirely new.”¹⁶

Similar senses of eerie familiarity have been expressed by listeners of Flow Machines’ algorithmic compositions and Dadabots’ AI mashups. For instance, a reviewer of Dadabots noted how “[t]his isn’t the first time someone’s programmed a machine to create new music. But this time is different. Because it’s actually quite good. And that’s pretty spooky.”¹⁷ With regards to the Beatles-inspired AI song “Daddy’s Car,” journalist James Vincent gave a tongue-in-cheek close reading of its machine-generated lyrics, which straddle the line between profundity and gibberish. Interpreting the line, “Down on the ground, the rainbow led me to the sun” Vincent sarcastically opines, “we realize the colorful rainbow road of AI leads us, just like Icarus, straight to the Sun, and our own destruction.”¹⁸

This brief overview suggests that responses to AI music are mostly a mix of bemusement, fascination, even abjection. At first glance, such reactions are arguably consistent with the long history of public hysteria over new technological forms, or what Robert Hughes referred to as modernity’s “shock of the new.”¹⁹ While listeners are indeed shocked by the revelation that what they first assumed to be old-fashioned human-made music was actually being made by nonhuman machines, the disconsolation provoked by AI music is not due to its radical break with the past, but rather, to its disquieting reanimation of it. In other words, it is AI music's uncanny appropriation of the past rather than its spectacular disclosure of the radically new that accounts for the underlying fear expressed by its listeners. Unlike the apocryphal tales of audiences panicking at an oncoming train at the Lumiere brothers’ first film screenings, or listeners becoming convinced of an imminent alien invasion during Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, AI music does not induce public panic so much as fatalistic dread of AI's ascendancy.

But before going too far down the narrative path of humanity's fateful encounter with its machinic usurpers, I contend that AI music's uneasy listening experience goes beyond oft-repeated tales of technology’s imminent replacement of humankind. Reactions to AI music are better understood by closely studying the more molecular disturbances its technical operations pose to music's assumed structural integrity and temporal coherence. Like all hauntological objects, AI music is uncanny not only for what it represents, but for how it works at the level of its technical form. AI music doesn’t merely symbolize society’s anxieties over artificial intelligence, it actively brings them into being via the temporal disjunctures produced by its very technical operations.

It does so by materially constructing what Mark Fisher obliquely referred to as a “technological uncanny.”²⁰ Although he never fully elaborated its precise meaning, the idea of the technological uncanny suggests that sonic hauntology’s eeriness stems from how it uses new technology to remediate older sonic artifacts in ways that deliberately upset how the past is usually represented. For instance, foundational works of sonic hauntology like Burial’s Untrue²¹ and the Focus Group’s We Are All Pan’s People²² used computer recording software to recapture content from other mediums such as reel-to-reel tapes and video game soundtracks. The source material was then truncated, transposed, and stretched by software known as digital audio workstations (DAWs) to create eerie new atmospheres and unsettling frequencies.

While techniques of sampling and remixing were invented long before sonic hauntology (famously pioneered by musique concrète artists in the early 20th century and further developed by dub and hip-hop producers in the late 20th century), what made sonic hauntology unique was its deliberate exposure of the recorded past’s technological foundations. Whereas the official function of recording technology was to store and preserve the integrity and legibility of its original content (for instance, compact discs were initially marketed to guarantee “perfect sound forever”), sonic hauntologists used recording instruments to foreground the sonic past’s irruptions and discontinuities.²³ In this way, sonic hauntologists brought the past back to life to interrogate rather than hide the sonic archive’s gaps and disjointedness. As Fisher writes: “Dyschronia is not repressed in hauntology; it rises to the surface. Or rather, it unsettles the very distinction between surface and depth, between background and foreground. In sonic hauntology, we hear that time is out of joint. The joins are audible—in the crackles, the hiss…”²⁴ In other words, sonic hauntology made concretely audible the temporal disunity and material artifice (the hiss, the crackle) that troubled common-sense assumptions of media’s smooth and effortless recapitulation of the past. Such faith in recordings’ veridical capacities originate from what the original philosopher of hauntology, Jacques Derrida,²⁵ famously referred to as Western civilization’s illusory investment in a “metaphysics of presence.”²⁶ Following Derrida’s formulation, sonic hauntology complicated this received wisdom by sonifying the archive’s paradoxes and contradictions. It brought recorded media’s skips and glitches to the surface to defy the metaphysics of presence’s false semblance of absolute clarity and transparency.

AI music follows sonic hauntology’s practice of plundering the archives of recorded media and resituating them within a drastically different context.²⁷ AI artists like Dadabots mysteriously capture the essence of an obsolete medium and reprocess it through the most contemporary means. Radically remaking the original source material, Dadabots’ AI program smudges, mangles, and smears Krallice’s pounding drums and chugging guitar riffs into a churning sea of noise, static, and occasionally melodious shards of digitally compressed sound. As a listener to Dadabots’ Coditany of Timeness (CoT) puts it, “[t]he strangest thing about CoT is that it reminds me of a raw live album, the sound could be from VHS footage captured next to a mosh pit at CBGBs in the 80s.”²⁸ This observation astutely captures the concept of the technological uncanny as an interpenetration of disparate historical media that defamiliarizes listeners from predictable representations of historical time. The impression of CoT’s grainy and muffled sound as an anachronistic VHS recording makes it sound like a spectral remainder of a former presence, but one that is paradoxically produced by the most cutting-edge technology today. Listening to CoT, the listener is confronted with a techno-historical paradox—how can something made by something so new sound so uncannily old and (un)comfortably familiar? Out of this contradiction is where the technological uncanny emanates.

Though there is nothing to suggest that Dadabots’ creators deliberately generate such contradictions, their practice nonetheless inherits the aesthetic ethos of older sonic hauntologists. Like all of hauntology’s sonic practitioners, Dadabots remediate the recorded past by new technological affordances. Dadabots’ programmers even describe their neural synthesis framework in strikingly hauntological terms. As they explain:

Seized by the present and transformed into a new synthetic combination, Dadabots scramble and reassemble their source material’s temporal coordinates. As they describe, the iconic genres of rock and jazz persist, but now only as traces of their former unity and structural coherence. Sweeping up bits and fragments from their archives and feeding them into complex computing machines, their histories are scrambled and reassembled into wholly new composite forms. No longer guaranteeing legibility and reproducibility, their assumed integrity disappears, leaving only traces of their former coherence in the fleeting moments of recognition for the original source material, now scattered across the newly composited sonic artifact.

The strange world of Dadabots and other AI music experimentalists contains untold potential for messing with sonic media’s temporal coordinates in ways that inherit the aesthetic ethos of past sonic hauntologists. Dadabots reinitiate the hauntological zeitgeist by summoning the depths of the digital archive and its reuptake by neural networks. Like their hauntological precursors, Dadabots explore their chosen sonic archive with cutting-edge tools, wielding instruments of artificial intelligence to mutate their source material into bizarre recombinations. Their radical annexation of the musical past subsequently creates a weird and unsettling listening experience in the present.

But it is not just the underground and avant-garde music communities that tap into AI music's hauntological tendencies. Unlike the experimentalists and eccentric outsiders who defined sonic hauntology in the 2000s, the current vanguard of hauntological production is taking place in the innermost citadels of the culture industry. For instance, when comparing industry-led experiments in AI to its underground counterparts, the Sony-funded “Daddy’s Car” is arguably a far more discomfiting listen than any of Dadabots' productions. While not the explicit intent of Sony or its subsidiary Flow Machines, in their profit-driven attempt to approximate human-made music as closely as possible, “Daddy's Car” unintentionally reveals the contradictions enacted by hauntology's technological uncanny. By algorithmically imitating historical style to create new simulacral productions, Sony’s appropriation of the past produces an even greater dramatic encounter between the assumed consistency of historical time and its nearly indiscernible re-simulation by computational machines.

On a compositional level, the song’s spritely melodies, charming vocals, and steady backbeat put a new varnish on the Beatles’ classic style of midtempo rock ’n’ roll. But experientially, the song carries dark and disturbing undertones rather than toe-tapping amusement. Unlike the actual Beatles, whose songs are forever immortalized in the pop culture canon, the origin of “Daddy's Car” is fundamentally synthetic and inorganic. It does not emerge from the collective alchemy of an iconic band, but from massive caches of data processed by automated algorithms and complex neural networks. Through the dense technicity of its computational operations, the song produces a sense of remoteness and otherness in the listener. Instead of emerging from a spark of human inspiration, it flows in from some mysterious elsewhere. The listener is left uncertain where its creation originates. Does it simply come from the moment of its algorithmic output? Or is it anterior to the actual object at hand, hiding enigmatically within the source material processed by the AI program? And what about the archival past it draws from to create its compositions—isn’t this the “true” source of its content? The schisms produced by its non-authorial origins and temporal inconsistencies are subsequently experienced by the listener at the level of its sonic output—materially sonifying the paradox of its own creation.³⁰

Replicating one of the most cherished artists from music history, “Daddy's Car” solicits a sense of closeness and intimacy, but one that is too close for comfort. Its disconcerting familiarity rises up from the netherworld of the technological uncanny. Billowing to the surface, the listener encounters the technological uncanny’s alien otherness and horrifyingly accurate rendering of one of pop culture’s most celebrated icons. Hearing the eerie approximation of the Beatles being reproduced by automated algorithmic processes, the smooth membrane that otherwise shields pop music from its subterranean spectral energies is punctured. Listeners are confronted with pop music’s inhuman other, an algorithmic ghost in the machine that troubles their faith in music’s supposedly human essence.

In this way, “Daddy’s Car” unwittingly reveals its capacities to scramble music history’s spatio-temporal coordinates and plunge common-sense narratives of pop music’s authorial authenticity and human uniqueness into crisis. Disclosing its logical contradictions in the very same stroke it attempts to gloss them over, “Daddy's Car” momentarily refers back to its own temporal and creational inconsistencies—threatening to undermine its investment in recapitulating and remonetizing pop music’s official archive. For this reason, although its artistic intent is largely incompatible with hauntology’s deconstructive project, in other ways “Daddy’s Car” is an object of sonic hauntology par excellence.

While the investors behind “Daddy's Car” will likely disregard the elisions, aporias, and irregularities operating below the song’s surface, they do so at their own peril. Neglecting the spectral residues produced by the technological uncanny hardly dissipates its energies, but incubates them to higher degrees of intensity. The broader political implications of releasing these spectral forces compose the basis of the following section and my investigation’s conclusions.

Before teasing out the political potentials that emerge from AI music’s haunting disturbances, a more fundamental question must be broached—why should we assume sonic hauntology bears any political efficacy to begin with? Perhaps this question is best approached by tracing the political trajectory of sonic hauntology’s original emergence in the early 2000s. I argue that the geographical, social, and cultural milieu of sonic hauntology’s founding theorists and practitioners provides the best framework by which to understand sonic hauntology’s political orientation, and therefore its critical potentials as well. In short, sonic hauntology’s political efficacy is inextricably linked to its historical context—a fact that likewise must be considered if we are to resituate sonic hauntology into today’s current conjuncture.

Composed largely of British intellectuals and art-school musicians who came of age in the heady days of early UK rave music, sonic hauntology solicited a bittersweet nostalgia for a time before Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal project of mass privatization and ruthless austerity. Sonic hauntologists crafted their spooky aural landscapes by sampling marginalia from the pre-Thatcher era of social democracy, such as radio broadcasts and public safety videos.³¹ These pre-neoliberal revenants formed the archival foundations of hauntology’s sonic vocabulary, communicating to its listeners a melancholic homage to a time before neoliberalism’s iron grip on society. Inspired by dub and hip-hop producers’ pioneering innovations in sampling and remixing, producers used these techniques to sonically summon the remnants of British culture snuffed out by Thatcher’s counterrevolution. Displaced from their historical home, the unbridled excitement and psychedelic sonic energy of past musical movements—such as the BBC’s adventurous Radiophonic Workshop and the UK’s bustling rave scene of the 1990s—were unsettlingly juxtaposed against the bland pastiche and retro revivalism that dominated the cultural climate. Mourning the once-revolutionary potentials of the past, the hauntological zeitgeist hailed by Fisher and others served as a somber indictment of neoliberalism’s suffocation of future imaginaries.³²

Sonic hauntology’s appeal to its target audience ultimately waned as the 2000s drew to a close. Yet despite a loss of interest, I argue that sonic hauntology’s political purchase has retained its potential. After all, its condemnation of capitalism’s ironclad consensus as the only game in town has hardly receded. With the arrival of AI music, I argue that sonic hauntology merits another reconsideration. While largely disregarded by sonic hauntology’s critics and practitioners, AI music’s novel deployment of technology to the sonic archives of the past harbors the potential to revivify sonic hauntology as a critical aesthetic practice. Moreover, its imbrication within the broader discourses concerning artificial intelligence’s supposed superiority over human labor and human intellect pushes it beyond simply being a revival or homage to sonic hauntology.

Whereas sonic hauntology’s first iteration may have been limited by its historical specificity to Thatcherite neoliberalism, AI music’s imbrication within the global spread of artificial intelligence technologies carries the potential to renew the political relevance of sonic hauntology on a vastly larger scale. The significant ideological and financial investment in AI by the dominant social order opens the doorway for AI music to be a radically immanent critique of its own social and historical embeddedness within late capitalism’s current conjuncture. Thus, if the political efficacy of sonic hauntology’s first iteration stemmed from its immanent critique of the neoliberal turn, today’s AI music likewise gains its political purchase as an immanent critique of today’s hyper-digitalized capitalism—typified by corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Google that praise AI as a marvel of productivity enhancement and economic efficiency.³³ The ideological presumptions and technocratic fantasies driving AI’s evangelization by the ruling elite should hardly come as a surprise—nor should the darker reality of its actual application. In the world’s peripheries, AI’s glossy marketing campaigns give way to brutish displays of force. Its suite of predictive algorithms, surveillance drones, and high frequency trading (HFT) software become concrete threats to survival instead of instruments of salvation. Outside the ruling class’s fortified sanctuaries, AI is bluntly wielded to underwrite late capitalism’s declaration of full-spectrum dominance. For the global poor, AI’s technocratic mastery does not convey social progress, but a coercive threat—that the rulers and their superior machines will dispossess them from the global economy if they refuse to submit to capitalism’s neoliberal orthodoxy.

But inside this grave scenario resides the possibility of its subversion. Since artificial intelligence is intimately entangled within the highly ideologized discourse of high-tech capitalism, its admittance into the tumult of the global culture industry makes AI music uniquely suited for political intervention. As sonic hauntology has already shown, when the marvels of digital media are applied to pop music, disturbances to temporal experience and authorial integrity open opportunities to momentarily crack the foundations of popular culture from within. Likewise, the uncanny effects elicited by AI music have the potential to undermine artificial intelligence’s monopolization by the data industries and their suffocation of alternative imaginaries.

By repurposing the most cutting-edge technologies that are essential to the ruling order’s assertions of its own historical necessity, AI music carries the capacity to undermine capitalism’s swaggering confidence in its own techno-ideological supremacy. While AI music doesn’t succeed in prescribing alternative futures and saving mass culture from its creative deadlock, as no such imaginary currently exists, its power lies in the potential to solicit the intolerable nature of this condition from the listener. In other words, AI music sonifies the predicament of late capitalism’s dissolution of future alternatives. In doing so, it inherits sonic hauntology’s project of troubling capitalism’s claim to world-historical omnipotence.

It is in fact the intolerable nature of AI music so often invoked by listeners who reject its unnatural origins that, I argue, contains the kernel of possibility to redirect its negative charge away from the algorithms that produce it, and toward the cultural condition that impoverishes society’s ability to imagine it as a tool of collective emancipation. It invites us to imagine a world where AI is not deployed to further capitalism’s hegemony, but to release us from its drudgery and create an emancipative world of collective prosperity. The abjection so many listeners feel toward AI music, like the accounts from those profiled earlier, belies a deeper disturbance over the helpless feeling of inevitability that capital’s technocratic mastery of the once-ineffable domain of human creativity implies. AI music disturbs listeners less so because of the implication of robots soon replacing us than because of the feeling of fatalistic inevitability that drives this conclusion—that there is no future other than the forward march of capital automating us out of existence.

But capitalism constricts the future not only by snuffing out alternative prescriptions. Its project is to cut off imaginative thinking from all sides, both prospectively and retrospectively, sealing up any recourse of escape. In other words, capitalism monopolizes not only visions of the future but also interpretations of the past. While this may simply recall the centuries-long tradition of rulers deploying revisionist history to stamp out more subversive legacies, the truly innovative move of late capitalism is to control its historical narrative not by prohibiting access to its archive but by freely offering it to us in its excessive plenitude. Blinded by the overwhelming presence of its radiant array of information, the bottomless wormhole of YouTube clips, clickbait, and the incessant feed of social media, the past is no longer graced with the possibility of erasure, and consequently, a doorway to the creation of new futures. History becomes trapped in the liminal space between belonging to the chronically unforgettable past and digital capitalism’s foreclosure of different futures. The political thickness of the past becomes diluted by the oppressive overabundance of the media stream.

But the suppression of history’s more subversive legacies does not eradicate their political efficacy once and for all. Rather, it pushes them onto an even more unstable and subterranean register.³⁴ Ultimately, capitalism’s dream of de-corporealizing itself through the magic of financial instruments, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence simultaneously admits a new level of uncanniness into its techno-economic matrix. The radiance of knowledge it shines down from its celestial cloud simultaneously casts a shadow—a specter that looms over and undermines the supposedly veridical transparency of its official archive.

It is this intrinsic contradiction that “Daddy’s Car” unexpectedly captures so vividly. It foregrounds both digital media’s technocratic mastery of space-time and the spectral or haunting feeling such self-assured certainty betrays. “Daddy’s Car” shows how the more AI perfects both the data industries and the culture industries—thus intensifying capital’s hegemony all the more drastically—the more it also admits uncanny and destabilizing energies into its remit. The more it seeks to subsume everything into its orbit, the more it unwittingly allows in the “dangerous supplements” as well, which, as Derrida reminds us, have the capacity to overtake what they were supposed to serve.³⁵ Full spectrum dominance lapses into full spectral dominance.

Hauntology’s gift lies in its steadfast opposition to postmodernity’s carefree abandonment of historicity’s political depth. Though one could hardly qualify such opposition as militant, its mourning for the lost potentials of the pre-neoliberal past nonetheless resists late capitalism’s triumphal declaration of victory—the end of history. Hauntology is postmodernism’s “zombie twin” refusing to go along with it “glossing over the temporal disjunctures” of the past.”³⁶ Thus, unlike postmodernism’s analgesic resuscitation of history, hauntology works against its appropriation as a spectacle of retro pastiche. It disallows capitalism’s omission of humanity’s tumultuous past—the violence and struggle that underlies each era. It upsets official history’s temporal coordinates by bringing its elisions to the fore, resisting capitalism’s codification of history into an assortment of flavors that elicit some vague taste of pastness. While perhaps an overly bitter pill for some, hauntology’s bizarre palette of sensations nonetheless harbors the potential to estrange listeners from the dominant culture’s parade of superficial revivalism they are forced to swallow.

As I have argued, it is AI-generated music that most provocatively beckons hauntology’s spectral sensations today. Its explosive potential to rescramble the coordinates of the musical past in radically new ways places sonic hauntology at the precipice of another creative revitalization. Just as sonic hauntology’s emergence last decade was precipitated by new channels of communication and recording technology, with AI it has in its grasp an entirely new set of tools to reenter the sonic archives once again.³⁷ But the affordances that AI presents to sonic hauntology are not intended to suggest a linear narrative of its formal progress. In other words, hauntology does not get more refined as its tools of production advance.³⁸ There is no asymptotic point of hauntological singularity that awaits us. Hauntology cannot solve the crisis of futurity, let alone offer concrete examples of radical alternatives. It simply presents to its listeners the problematic of the crisis itself, bringing its impasses to the foreground in order to defy the overarching edicts enforced by the ruling consensus. It audibly foregrounds the asynchronies and discontinuities that capitalism’s foreclosure of alternatives attempts to hastily conceal. It does so by sonically constructing a technological uncanny that destabilizes capitalism's self-serving narratives of its algorithmically executed supremacy. As we hear in the spooky residues of AI-generated music, its uncanniness reveals the tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and irritability operating underneath digital capitalism’s gleaming surfaces. Thus, AI-generated music has the potential to interrupt the culture industry’s desire for the mundane perfection it articulates to the epistemology of the digital. Its uncanniness reminds us how this very epistemology remains up for grabs. It attunes us to frequencies that estrange and defamiliarize our acceptance of postmodern capital’s nostalgia entertainment complex.

Despite the critical potentials for such uneasy listening, we can fully expect AI-generated music to continue being championed by the tech industry, harnessing its irresistible ability to mimic cherished archives of the past. Thus, in a kind of sobering corrective to Dadabot’s optimistic vision of AI music’s future, one should expect the data industries—no longer content with just storing history in their sprawling network of server farms—will soon demand authorization to resurrect and project infinite versions of our collective memories. In this dystopic vision, pop music history will have become immemorially contained and eternally resurrected with an infinite capacity to serve up new objects of consumption. Whether you want to hear a pseudo-original Beatles song like “Daddy’s Car” or watch the morbid spectacle of deceased celebrities being paraded around as live holograms,³⁹ postmodernism’s “permanent revival” is poised to take on unsettling new intonations.

The various AI ventures currently explored by major record labels suggest a concerted effort to find ways of creating new content by algorithmic means instead of relying on the costly labor of human songwriters and producers. Convincingly mimicking the style of their back catalogue’s highest sellers would undoubtedly present an appealing way to increase their profit margins. If successful, it is plausible that AI will be fully incorporated by the entertainment industry for the express purpose of creating convincing simulacra of their best-selling products. These efforts suggest that the supposedly irreducible necessity of human labor in the creative industries is in fact hardly immune from technological automation and thus follows capital’s drive to weaken the power of labor across the global economy.

Hence, it is in the very potentials of AI music to reengage listeners and inspire critical cultural practice that its vulnerabilities are simultaneously exposed. If the public is indeed hungry for uncanny incantations of the musical past, then the capacity for capitalism’s nostalgia industry to appropriate or subsume any nascent critical energy offered by this demand back into its commodity matrix should not be underestimated. As history has shown, capitalism’s ability to convert a challenge to its authority into a consumable object is one of its most cunning maneuvers. Capitalism’s plans to further develop AI music suggest it too has potential for eventual mass commodification.⁴⁰

Overall, AI music’s radical capacities should be tempered by the reality of the existential crises facing cultural form today, and by society’s attitude toward future imaginaries altogether. In this scenario, AI music doesn’t necessarily promise a radical alternative to our present moment but hopefully a momentary sense of alterity from it.