The Music Code

From composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Lucas Cantor Santiago—collaborator with Lorde, The Wu-Tang Clan, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, DreamWorks, Disney, Netflix, and more—comes the history, co-evolution, and collision of music and technology, culminating in the author’s groundbreaking completion of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony using Artificial Intelligence. 

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In 2019, Los Angeles-based composer, producer, and conductor Lucas Cantor Santiago was asked by the Chinese technology company, Huawei, to finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony using Artificial Intelligence. Like most jobs, it came with a tight deadline and no time to reflect on the implications of such a project. It wasn’t until the morning of the premiere that Santiago started to contemplate what he had done. 

In The Music Code, Santiago journeys through musical and technological history, launched by the question: What does it mean that Artificial Intelligence can finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony? Ranging from manmade music of more than 40,000 years ago to a future where superintelligent technology routinely writes music, The Music Code explores what it means to be human in an ever-evolving world in which music and technology collide. 





In riveting detail Santiago narrates how Pythagoras, Saint Hildegard, Johannes Gutenberg, Franz Schubert, Thomas Edison, Gershwin, and a host of other musical and technology giants and forgotten geniuses grappled with the same contradictions and concerns that we face today, and how they contributed to the growth of art-focused technology in the best way they knew how. Their legacies are still with us. The way we frame discussions about creativity and technology are largely the way they framed them. But, as Santiago shows by recalling his own radical, futuristic work in AI-based music, it is not the only way.