Music and sound are fundamental aspects of how we interact with the environment and play an important role in shaping culture. Dr. Michael Frishkopf is an ethnomusicologist who is deploying the power of AI to formulate and test new hypotheses about the relationship between music and culture, speech and individuality. In this wide ranging conversation, we cover the relationship between math and music, the tough challenges of applying machine learning to sound, how the evolution of music technologies impacts culture, and what we can learn from sound in cyberworlds. “Everybody goes around recording these days….the problem is how do you categorize these things?…If you could develop good artificial intelligence machine learning tools, then you could do something like Alan Lomax was trying to do (build an ethnomusicology recording archive).” – Michael Frishkopf Michael Frishkopf is a Professor of Music at the University of Alberta, an ethnomusicologist, performer, and composer. Dr. Frishkopf’s ethnomusicological research interests include music of the Arab world; Sufi music; sound in Islamic ritual performance; music and religion; comparative music theory; the sociology of musical taste; social network analysis; (virtual [world) music]; digital music repositories; deep learning for sound recognition and music information retrieval; music in West Africa; participatory action research; psychoacoustics and music cognition; music and global health; indigenous medicine and music as medicine for integrative health; and music for global human development and social change.