Can AI generate music, Irish folk music? And what does it mean for the field?

Ireland is a small European country which makes everyone speak about it from year to year in the middle of March, when it’s time for St. Patrick’s Day celebration with its loud parades, almost-mandatory green dress code, shamrocks and leprechauns. Without going deeply into the history of the celebration, we can still say that traditional music is part of Irish national identity which not only has preserved its heritage while being part of the British Empire but is also enjoying its current life and shaping the future.

Inspiring? Absolutely would be, if not for AI algorithms which had already discovered authentic tunes.

Now, we are not saying they make nothing good to music, but such synthesis asks for new lenses to look at the future of Irish folk. We ground this article on the scientific paper where the main research question was

How can researchers and engineers (academic or industrial) who develop and apply AI to specific music practices make meaningful and non-harmful contributions to those practices?

Technical details

Affiliation(s): KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden)
Year of publication: 2025
Type of paper: Research article

Link to the full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09298215.2024.2442359?needAccess=true

The paper is not a standard scientific study but a critical overview of the tensions arising between researchers, commercial AI players, and music communities. It is thought-provoking, so we focus on the sub-questions it aims to answer and the ideas it plants for musicians, scholars, AI developers and common people for whom traditional tunes are more than a sign of ongoing festivities.