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Politics & government

THE UNCANNY MUSE

David Hajdu

Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI

An acclaimed critic, journalist, and songwriter-musician tells the story of art's relation to machines, from the Baroque period to the age of AI.

What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? What is this "uncanny valley," and how did we get here? As the field of art made by artificial intelligence begins to expand dramatically, questions about the role of technology in contemporary culture become ever more urgent. In The Uncanny Muse, David Hajdu explores the history of automation in the arts, tracing the varied ways inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes, or fuse the mechanized world and the human soul, over the centuries. Moving from the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines by drawing pictures in Victorian London to the doll's modern-day AI counterpart, Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it?and sees no reason why this shouldn't be the case with AI today. David Hajdu is the author of seven books, including Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction, and a three-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He is the music critic for the Nation and a journalism professor at Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

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Book Published 2025-02-04 by W. W. Norton

Comments

Fabulous and stimulating. We humans have always had a deep fascination with mechanical objects and an equally deep urge to create art. David Hajdu skillfully brings these two strands together in a work of elegant synthesis, revealing a deep understanding of what makes us and our machines tick and our art sing.

As AI flirts with aesthetics, the questions may change, but the riddles just get gnarly: can 'smart' machines sound sexy? Do robots make art for other robots? What blind spots form when composers play duets with algorithms? Tracing how mechanics has long tinkered with our imaginations, from clocks and cameras to Steinways, player pianos, microphones, Moogs, and beyond, Hajdu's tantalizingly brief book coasts on that Elvis quote, 'Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.' A thought bomb on every page.

Are song-making algorithms only the latest in a long series of musical amanuenses? Or is generative AI a new kind of musical synthesizera synthesizer of the human creator? The Uncanny Muse offers a timely, richly informative, and beautifully written inquiry into the origins of 'computational creativity,' framed in the historical context of human creativity and our many mechanical muses.

Fascinating. The result of David Hajdu's extensive research, interviews, and expert journalism is a cornucopia of ideas involving art, music, machines, computers, and AI, excitingly interspersed with personal interviews of many of the key innovators still living. Curiosity and creativity combine in this fine accomplishment.

David Hajdu is the rare sort of critic whose deep intelligence and even deeper humanity can challenge or rearrange even the most deeply held positions about culture. I thought I knew how I felt about AI, artifice, authenticity, the so-called machine condition and its relationship to art. The Uncanny Muse made me rethink all of it. A miraculous book, written with extraordinary grace.

Into a moment when AI's troubling role in the present and future of artistic creation rules the discourse, David Hajdu's The Uncanny Muse brings an exciting and essential sense of history, perspective, and boundless curiosity. This constantly surprising exploration of 150 years of boundary-pushing and limit-testing innovations in the realm of who, or what, can make art reframes the discussion in a vital and fascinating way.

David Hajdu has tapped into something vital. This very engaging book places art and music at the center of our long history of collaboration with machines, reaffirming the importance of situating the human spirit at the center of today's artificial intelligence efforts.

David Hajdu, one of our most important arts and cultural critics, confronts one of the most divisive aesthetic issues facing us today. In The Uncanny Muse, Hajdu interviews jazz and rock musicians, visits museums and laboratories, goes to nightclubs, galleries, and a Christie's auction to hear and evaluate the work of artists who either resist or embrace mechanical arts, finding them authentic or fraudulent, innovative or derivative, liberating or dehumanizing. What, in the end, Hajdu forces us to ask ourselves, does it mean to sound human?