Lectures in Music Studies: Tina Tallon, The Ohio State University

Tina Tallon, assistant professor of Artificial Intelligence and Music Composition, presents "The Vibe as Cultural Compression Algorithm."

On February 2, 2025, OpenAI co‑founder Andrej Karpathy unknowingly landed himself in the annals of linguistic history when he coined the term “vibe coding” in a tweet referring to his weekend experiments with large language models (LLMs) as tools for producing code. In the year since, the expanded use of LLMs and agentic AI has made many tasks seem accomplishable “by vibe,” from shopping to investing to composing (now “vibe shopping,” “vibe investing,” “vibe composing”).

While the ubiquity of the vibe long predates Karpathy’s evocation, a marked shift in its use occurred during the COVID‑19 pandemic. We increasingly relied on digital platforms for connection, while exhaustion, overwhelm, and grief often left us with few words. We were keenly aware that “the vibes were off,” while “no thoughts just vibes” became an aspirational state of carefree escape. However, beneath the surface, the vibe and the multimodal data associated with it (text, images, audio, video) gained popularity as a way of rendering legible rich complexity to the algorithms that prioritize and reward concise textual descriptors.

For musicians, the paradox between the vibe’s origins as an immersive, ineffable physical phenomenon (i.e. a literal vibration) and its modern utility as a textual stand‑in for complexity may seem particularly uncanny. However, this disconnect is consistent with post‑war AI research trajectories which largely privilege linguistic and symbolic models of cognition over embodied ones. As a result, today’s dominant AI systems encode a worldview in which culture becomes tractable as text, and the vibe becomes a lossy proxy for the specificity and materiality of creative practice.

Winner of the 2022 Rome Prize in Music Composition, Tina Tallon is a creative technologist whose work investigates how artificial intelligence shapes creative practice and cultural understanding. Her music and interactive installations have been presented in venues ranging from the world’s most celebrated concert halls to the Venice Biennale, the Large Hadron Collider, major motion pictures, and leading AI conferences like NeurIPS. She has received numerous awards and fellowships from institutions such as Harvard, MIT, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Tallon serves as assistant professor of AI and music composition at The Ohio State University.