Learning AI with music: A sound-based dissemination activity for high school students

We present a dissemination activity developed as an interactive laboratory for high school students aimed at introducing the basic principles of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning through music as an entry point. The activity is designed to be engaging, using the familiarity of the students with musical instruments to explain the concept of machine learning from data. Participants are invited to record sounds of real instruments, which are then used to train a classifier in real time, showing how a machine can learn to recognize different types of input data. Then we briefly introduce current music creation tools based on Machine Learning, such as splitters that can separate individual instruments from a mixed track. A second part of the activity focuses on Generative AI, introducing the core ideas through links between using text and signals and a musical Turing test: students are asked to distinguish between songs played by human musicians and others generated by AI models. We report the results collected from the hundreds of students who have already participated, along with the educational objectives of the activity, which include stimulating curiosity and critical thinking about the field and the possible future impacts.