Nikita Braguinski Interview (Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to Music AI)
Nikita Braguinski is a musicologist and historian of technology. He studied musicology at the University of Cologne and wrote his PhD in media theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, a postdoctoral fellow in the music department at Harvard University, and most recently a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. His new book is Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to Music AI.
Can you please briefly describe yourself and what you do?
I am a musicologist with a special interest in connections between music, technology, and mathematics. I studied musicology in Cologne, Germany, wrote my PhD in Berlin on early video game music, and now continue to study the many things that make music for us (or maybe instead of us).
When people hear I study music technology, they first of all think of recording technology, like the vinyl record or an mp3. But this is in fact not at all what I study most. Instead, I personally find it much more interesting to look at technologies that create, or seem to create, what we call music. So, I look at how artificial intelligence (AI), and especially machine learning or deep learning, is used to generate music. But I also find it equally fascinating to look at the ways people ingeniously employed all the other possibilities that they had before the computer came, like shuffled stacks of cards, slabs of wood, paper circles, and, of course, the famous rolling dice.