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Music: From Organic Bodies to Artificial Minds

Friday, December 12, 2025 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EST
Online
Music: From Organic Bodies to Artificial Minds
Event Type: 
Webcast
Lecture
Open To: 
Alumni
Topic: 
Music
Core Curriculum
Location: 
Online

Event Contact

Columbia College Golden Lions
2128517807

This webinar explores music not as mere acoustic patterns but as an embodied technology our ancestors developed to solve a specific problem: establishing and maintaining social bonds. When we make or listen to music, we participate in an embodied, community-building practice that enables coordinated movement and encodes our most cherished cultural values. This social-motor foundation explains why music persists across all human cultures, despite lacking immediate survival utility. This perspective directly addresses the growing anxiety that artificial intelligence (AI) threatens human creativity. While algorithms can generate novel sounds and master musical form, they cannot be truly creative in a human sense. AI lacks the evolutionary drive for social bonding and the stake in human values that form the essential motivation for music-making: the need to connect with others through a collective physical experience.

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