The relationship between AI and music is as old as AI itself, and the pioneering work in this field comes from very different places, takes very diverse forms, and responds to widely varied intentions. Nao Tokui is a perfect example. Artist, DJ, and researcher, he was already producing music with AI during his PhD at the University of Tokyo in the early 2000s, including his debut album and a collaboration with Nujabes, the legendary Japanese hip-hop producer. In 2009 he founded Qosmo, a laboratory for creativity, AI, and music that has taken him to MoMA, the Barbican, and Sónar+D itself. Today he leads Neutone, a company dedicated to the development of AI-based musical instruments, and he is the author of Surfing Human Creativity with AI, his first book in English on AI and creativity.

Innovation (and a good deal of digital art) emerges from using existing tools in the wrong way: it's this deviation that forces new paths and new results. Tokui's thesis is that there are instruments that resist the intentions of their designers, and that this resistance is precisely what keeps artistic practice alive in the age of generative AI. This is what the tools he develops at Neutone aim for (Neutone FX, a universal host for real-time audio models, and Neutone Morpho, the first commercial trainable real-time audio AI plugin): instruments designed not to generate optimal results, but to be diverted, pushed, deliberately misused. Tokui has spent more than two decades navigating this territory (and knows exactly where the reefs are).

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