Researcher secures ERC Consolidator grant

University of Sussex researcher secures ERC Consolidator grant. The School of Media, Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Professor Thor Magnusson an ERC Consolidator grant for his project Intelligent Instruments: Understanding 21st-Century AI Through Creative Music Technologies . The research will be hosted at the Icelandic University of the Arts, where Magnusson has been appointed a Research Professor, a role he will split with his professorship at Sussex. Conducted in the domain of music, the project is transdisciplinary with a broad humanities basis. This five-year 2 million Euro research project will consist of a team of postdocs, doctoral researchers and an instrument designer from the fields of music, computer science and philosophy, already involving two Sussex researchers in his team, Dr Francisco Bernardo and Halldor Ulfarsson. The project invites experts from a wide range of scientific fields to study creative AI and embodied intelligent instruments through music. The project will develop technologies that interact, learn and evolve in the hands of the performer and create a collaborative platform to study how our language and discourse adapts to these new methods of making and performing music, for example through changing notions of agency, autonomy, authenticity, authorship, creativity and originality.