Speculating on Reflection and People’s Music Co-Creation with AI

The evaluation of such tools for novice’s co-creation with generative AI systems have generally been inspired by ‘third-wave’HCI techniques [7], examining how tools support engagement as opposed to ease-of-use [6, 7]. For example, see [1, 10, 19, 23]. However, this does not necessarily support novices in exploring some of the holistic benefits of creative practice, such as growing themselves artistically (for example, a composer might consider how their music meets their artistic intentions [21, 42]) or complementing their understanding of other creative experiences (for example, composers might consider how performers might interpret their notations [21, 42]). In this paper, we take an alternative viewpoint which emphasises reflection in the co-creative process between people and generative AI systems. Indeed, we suggest that an alternative role for AI in a collaborative creative process could be to encourage reflection. We explore this through the lense of music AI co-creators, first i) systematically exploring reflection in musical co-creative AI literature, and ii) suggesting the design of a user interface to provide opportunities for reflection in novice’s music co-creation with AI.