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Unfinished

The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Unfinished cover

Unfinished

The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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Pre-order. Available Dec 11 2025
$21.56 RRP $26.95 Website price saving $5.39 (20%)

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Description

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 musicmaking, 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I
Allegro
From Myths to Microchips

II
Andante
Big Questions

III
Scherzo
Cows, DNA, and the Man of the Millennium

IV
Rondo
Saints, Sibyls, Sinners, and Symphonies

Acknowledgments
Index

Product details

Published Dec 11 2025
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 256
ISBN 9798765143186
Imprint Backbeat
Illustrations 6 b/w illustrations
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Lucas Cantor Santiago

Lucas David Cantor Santiago is a composer, produce…

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