Creative Work Futures: Musicians, Automation and Artificial Intelligence

This thesis examines musicians’ adaptive, resistant, and improvisatory practices in response to visions that anticipate a profound shift of creativity for the “future of work” in a context of growing automated, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies. The findings demonstrate that the extent to which these visions might be realised is plural, diverse, and contingent upon musicians’ values and the technological affordances they imagine and materialise. Drawing on an 18-month multi-sited ethnography in Melbourne’s creative ecology, the study accounts for how music technologies and creative practices emerge, and are culturally, socially, and materially situated, and the implications this has for musicians’ career pathways and livelihoods.