Embracing Eclecticism: How Music and AI Empower the Modern Student

In a digital age overflowing with tools and information, we must learn to navigate complexity with curiosity.

In my final year at Bowdoin, I helped organize Klavierfest, a festival exploring intersections of music, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. As both a speaker and organizer, and as the only student speaker, I presented a talk titled “Embracing Eclecticism: How Music and AI Empower the Modern Student.”

My argument was simple but urgent: in a digital age overflowing with tools and information, students must learn not to outsource thinking but to navigate complexity with curiosity. AI can be a collaborator, expanding and refining our knowledge, but it should never replace the spark of human insight. Music, with its history of improvisation and cross‑pollination, offers a model for how eclectic learning can cultivate creativity, resilience, and self‑understanding.

Working with my professor George Lopez, I coordinated with researchers and performers from Harvard, Juilliard, and the National University of Singapore to bring diverse voices to the festival. I also demonstrated Steinway’s Spirio piano, an acoustic piano with a hyper‑accurate ability to play back recordings, either from a live pianist, historical recordings mastered by sound engineers, or concert pianists who recorded on another Spirio.