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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2025
As intelligence technology advances, the boundaries between humans and machines blur, prompting questions regarding human identity and agency. While opera has traditionally explored such existential tensions, contemporary productions often emphasise technological narratives, potentially overshadowing human-centred perspectives. This article investigates music’s expressive potential to bridge these divergent viewpoints, positing it as a distinct form of ‘listening’ to and ‘knowing’ the world. Through a case study of Hao Weiya’s chamber opera AI Variation (2021), it probes how a musical approach communicates intricate ethical and existential questions posed by advancing AI technologies. The findings reveal that music’s non-linguistic nature creates an experiential space to explore, feel and contemplate human experiences. Orchestral voices craft sonic landscapes that invite contemplation on being and perception in an AI-driven world, and music conveys complexities beyond what words alone can express. The article illuminates how music contributes to a humanist response to technological advances, enriching cultural and philosophical discourse.
1 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 280.
2 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Computing the Human’, Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 1 (February 2005), pp. 131–51, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276405048438.
3 Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity’, in Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 1–33.
4 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900., vol. 8. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
5 Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Tomás McAuley et al. (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 740–61.
6 Christopher Morris, ‘Casting Metal: Opera Studies after Humanism’, The Opera Quarterly 35, no. 1–2 (1 November 2019), pp. 77–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbz015.
7 Bernd Brabec De Mori and Anthony Seeger, ‘Introduction: Considering Music, Humans, and Non-Humans’, Ethnomusicology Forum 22, no. 3 (December 2013), pp. 269–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2013.844527.
8 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
9 See https://www.klingklangklong.com/works/chasing-waterfalls; accessed 07/02/2025.
10 Alexander Sigman, ‘Robot Opera: Bridging the Anthropocentric and the Mechanized Eccentric’, Computer Music Journal 43, no. 1 (1 January 2019), p. 22, https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00498.
11 Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition: A Conversation with Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles’, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 10, no. SI (2022), https://doi.org/10.14426/cristal.v10iSI.589.
12 For further discussion on the limitations of linguistic representation in capturing human-technology interactions, see D. R. Ford and M. Sasaki, ‘Listening Like a Postdigital Human: The Politics and Knowledge of Noise-Postdigital Humans’, in Postdigital Humans: Transitions, Transformations and Transcendence (Cham: Springer, 2021), pp. 111–24; and Marc Leman, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). These works explore the complex, multifaceted nature of our engagement with technology, particularly in the context of music and sound, highlighting the inadequacy of purely linguistic approaches to understanding these phenomena.
13 Clemens Risi, Opera in Performance: Analyzing the Performative Dimension of Opera Productions, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2021), p. 61.
14 Amy Bauer, ‘Contemporary Opera and the Failure of Language’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson, 1st ed. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 427–53, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315613291-19.
15 Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Über Musik und Sprache. Variationen und Ergänzungen’, in Musik-Sprachen: Beiträge Zur Sprachnähe Und Sprachferne von Musik Im Dialog Mit Albrecht Wellmer, ed. Christian Utz et al. (Germany: Pfau, Saarbrücken, 2013), pp. 9–40.
16 Garbiel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Volume 1: Reflection and Mystery, (London: The Harvill Press, 1950).
17 Lawrence Kramer, The Thought of Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), p. 165, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520963627.
18 Carolyn Marvin, ‘Reconsidering James Carey: How Many Rituals Does It Take to Make an Artifact?’, American Journalism, no. 7 (1990), pp. 216–26.
19 Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
20 Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York: Verso, 1998).
21 Vida Chenoweth and Robert Longacre, ‘Music as Discourse’. Word 37, no. 1–2 (January 1986), pp. 135–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1986.11435772.
22 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Music, Language, and Composition’, The Musical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1993), pp. 401–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/77.3.401.
23 V. Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Aventures in Romantic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 18.
24 Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
25 Tomás McAuley et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, p. 763.
26 Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 12.
27 A shift toward embracing music’s experiential richness and resisting reductive analyses is evident in recent scholarship: music’s cognitive and emotive dimensions beyond semantic content is explored in: Peter Kivy, Music, Language, and Cognition: And Other Essays in the Aesthetics of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); narrow analytical approaches in favour of music’s world-disclosing capacities is critiqued in: Andrew Bowie, ‘The “Philosophy of Performance” and the Performance of Philosophy’, Performance Philosophy 1, no. 1 (10 April 2015); how embodied experience shapes musical temporality is examined in: Mariusz Kozak, Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music (30 January 2020).
28 Lawrence Kramer, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).
29 Roman Ingarden, Adam Czerniawski and Jean G. Harrell, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
30 Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric. Musical Form and the Metaphor of Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 121.
31 Witkin, Adorno on Music, p. 11.
32 Max Paddison, ‘Meaning and Autonomy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 778.
33 Simon Schaerlaeken, Donald Glowinski and Didier Grandjean, ‘Linking Musical Metaphors and Emotions Evoked by the Sound of Classical Music’, Psychology of Music 50, no. 1 (2022), pp. 245–64.
34 Steve Larson, Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
35 Lawrence Kramer, The Thought of Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
36 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004), pp. 505–36.
37 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
38 Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Über Musik und Sprache. Variationen und Ergänzungen’.
39 This shift in musicology is exemplified by Carolyn Abbate, ‘Overlooking the Ephemeral’, New Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017), pp. 75–102; Carolyn Abbate, ‘Sound Object Lessons’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 69, no. 3, (2016), pp. 793–829. A nuanced examination of this trend is provided in Martin Scherzinger, ‘Event or Ephemeron? Music’s Sound, Performance, and Media’, Sound Stage Screen 1, no. 1, (2021), pp. 145–92.
40 McAuley et al., The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, p. 23.
41 Further discussion on how this mode of perception provides alternative philosophical insights include: Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa: The Ad. E. Jensen Lectures at the Frobenius Institut, University of Frankfurt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition: A Conversation with Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles’, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 10, no. Si1 (2022), pp. 164–76.
42 Henri Bergson and Mabelle Louise Andison, The Creative Mind (New York: The Philisophical Library, 1946), p. 161.
43 Ronald David Schwartz, ‘Artificial Intelligence as a Sociological Phenomenon’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 14, no. 2 (1989), p.179, https://doi.org/10.2307/3341290.
44 Leonard B. Meyer, The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
45 José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961).
46 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), p. 191.
47 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 14.
48 Julian Johnson, After Debussy: Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 2.
49 Maurice Merleu-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 64.
50 Adrienne LaFrance, ‘A Defense of Humanity in the Age of AI’, The Atlantic, 5 June 2023.
51 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 11.
52 Christopher Wintle, Bayan Northcott, and Irene Samuel (eds.), Hans Keller: Essays on Music (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89.
53 Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’. in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, Toms McAuley et al. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2020).