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Donate The American Musicological Society is pleased to announce that Matthew Blackmar has received the Society’s 2024 Paul A. Pisk Prize. We congratulate and thank him for his extraordinary work. In its award decision, the Paul A. Pisk Prize Committee notes:
“Matthew Blackmar’s indispensable guide through the world of vocal deepfakes begins with a lucid account of how they are made and concludes with a probing evaluation of their ramifications for the law, authorship, and even the climate (on account of the massive amounts of power that the AI generators draw). Throughout, Blackmar shows how musicology has an important contribution to make to this public discourse, especially because of the challenges that deepfakes pose to long-standing categories for describing and judging art. Such formal problems meet urgent, practical ones of trust and commerce, because, where attribution becomes nearly impossible, so does the assignment of copyright. In drawing attention to these and other problems, Blackmar’s presentation renders an invaluable service in preparing the public for the coming changes in artistic practice and its legal frameworks, all in the hope of steering them to our advantage, be those advantages social, economic, political, or creative.”
Matthew Day Blackmar is a musicologist, media/information studies scholar, and classical/pop musician whose research interests orbit the figure of the musical amateur, engaging contemporary digital practice, modern recording engineering and sound design, and nineteenth-century print cultures—each through the critical lens of the social construction of technology, musical authorship, and “intellectual property.” He received the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship and the Ingolf Dahl Award from the American Musicological Society. Prior to graduate study at UCLA, Matthew performed as a DJ and contributed keyboards, programming, and string arrangements to indie pop, hip-hop, and heavy-metal recordings in Los Angeles.
