Unfinished

For most of his career, the Emmy Award–winning composer and producer Lucas Cantor Santiago was a self-described luddite. Technology, he felt, was moving too fast, transforming the world and the arts with no regard for the cost in tradition, hard-won human wisdom, and tried-and-true methods of mastery.

That changed, however, when Cantor Santiago was commissioned by Huawei, one of the largest technology companies on the planet, to collaborate with artificial intelligence and finish Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony—a successful experiment that attracted attention throughout the world. Creating music in collaboration with a machine led him to question his long-standing assumptions about what music is, what technology does, and how the two have evolved together over the course of human history, from the first bone flute to today’s landscape of constant innovation and change.

Drawing on Cantor Santiago’s extensive experience in the arts and tech worlds and his ongoing experiments with AI-powered music-making, Unfinished is an engaging and refreshingly optimistic meditation on the role of technology in music and the arts. What is the current state of the art? How did we get here? Where do we go now? This book provides an informed perspective on what is lost but what we also gain when we bring our machines ever further into the creation of art in its many different forms.