Postscript on the Musics of Control

Yinuo Chen

Keywords: gear economy, controllability, AI ethics

TL;DR: A study of control in today’s music that connects sociopolitical and sociotechnical perspectives, ties gear markets to AI music tools, and offers practical design steps for accessible, accountable, creativity-supporting tools.

Abstract: This paper traces how “control” is socially coded in contemporary music technology, and offers an account of the circuit of control to bridge the conceptual gap between the sociopolitical and the technical. The analysis redirects attention from the controllability of intelligent systems to the social formations through which control is allocated and recognized. To frame this shift, the paper theorizes the gear economy—a lens set alongside the much frequented concept gig economy in sociology—to explain how AI-music tools (e.g., Suno, Udio) are legitimated through existing music gear markets. The claim is coalition rather than addition: AI tools fold into pre-existing markets that price and credential controllability. Formally, the paper adopts a triptych that deliberately echoes Deleuze’s influential “Postscript” in title and cadence: Historical, Logic, Programming to progress its analysis. Rather than constructing a new vocabulary of control in music technologies, this paper demonstrates that the parameters and regimes of control—technical, economic, and political—are themselves social indices. The aim is a design-oriented ethical intervention that speaks to technologists, musicians, and the general public, rendering these arrangements visible and reconfigurable and redirecting control toward humans so that AI music tools augment rather than shrink creative agency.

Submission Number: 16