AI Music Generators Are Quietly Silencing Africa’s Musical Knowledge Systems

Artificial intelligence has swept into the music industry with remarkable speed. Platforms such as Suno, Udio, LANDR and Ozone can now compose full songs, master tracks, generate lyrics and even clone voices, transforming how music is made and distributed around the world. But a new study published in the journal AI & Society argues that this technological revolution carries a hidden cost: the systematic silencing of African musical traditions and the indigenous knowledge systems embedded within them. Drawing on the philosopher Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, researchers James Maisiri and Awakhiwe Thabiso Ncube of the University of Johannesburg contend that AI music platforms, trained overwhelmingly on Western data, are not culturally neutral tools but carriers of a specific epistemology that marginalises African ways of knowing.

Fricker’s framework distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a group lacks the interpretive resources, such as language, technology or theory, needed to make its experiences understood and validated by others. Testimonial injustice occurs when the credibility of a person or community as a knower is devalued because of prejudice or unequal power dynamics. The authors apply both concepts to the African musical context, arguing that AI systems wrong African communities twice over: first by failing to interpret and represent their musical knowledge accurately, and second by dismissing the credibility of that knowledge within technological infrastructures that privilege Western forms of documentation.

The technical evidence for this bias is substantial. Analyses of prominent training databases such as the Million Song Dataset and the GTZAN Genre Collection show they are heavily skewed toward Western repertoire. One 2025 study of music generation datasets found that Western genres account for roughly 94 percent of total dataset hours, while Middle Eastern, Latin American, South Asian, Oceanian, Central Asian and African music together make up just 5.7 percent. Research on the MuseData and Lakh MIDI datasets, staples of computational musicology, found that less than 6 percent of AI music training data is non-Western. The consequences are measurable: a 2026 empirical study found that two major commercial generators, Suno AI and Udio, failed to accurately reproduce Kenyan Benga melodies when asked to produce African music, as confirmed by sonic analysis and interviews with music experts.

The problem runs deeper than simple underrepresentation. Many African musical traditions rely on complex rhythmic structures, sliding notes and layered polyrhythms that resist the fixed beat and chord embeddings on which generative models depend. A genre adaptation experiment with Hindustani Classical and Turkish Makam, two underrepresented non-Western traditions, showed that while models possessed some adaptive capacity, their performance was significantly inconsistent compared with their Western baselines. Because much African music is transmitted orally rather than through formal notation, it is also harder to encode into the representational formats that deep learning requires. Even when African music is formalised in written form, it may still be marginalised by the dominance of English and particular digital classification frameworks.

The result, the authors argue, is a flattening of extraordinary diversity into a generic, exoticised sound. AI generative platforms tend to merge many distinct genres into a generalised African style of simplified polyrhythms, indigenous instruments and microtonal scales, stripping away the uniqueness and authenticity of individual traditions. For the Ewe people of Ghana, whose tonal language shapes songs with distinctive sliding notes and beat timing, this misrepresentation constitutes hermeneutical injustice: their knowledge is not merely absent from the systems but distorted when it appears. The long-standing Western tendency to view African musical structures as simplistic or monotonous compounds the harm, dismissing traditions refined over generations.

Why does this matter beyond aesthetics? Because in many African societies, music is not reducible to entertainment. It functions as a repository of indigenous knowledge, transmitting values, morals, ritual practices, history and social cohesion across generations. Among the Yoruba, drumming traditions announce births and communal meetings. Xhosa traditional healers use music and dance to connect with ancestors and heal physical and spiritual ills. The Krobo people of Ghana use music in the Dipo ceremony to educate girls entering puberty. Shona women in Zimbabwe deploy songs to fight social ills and condemn patriarchal behaviour, while anti-apartheid songs such as Stimela and Soweto Blues helped build value systems of resistance in South Africa. When AI platforms misrepresent or omit these traditions, they threaten the knowledge encoded within them.

The study situates this pattern within a longer colonial history of cultural extraction. Mid-twentieth-century missionaries appropriated indigenous sounds for Christian worship, and the explorer David Fanshawe recorded African singers whose voices earned him royalties while the performers were excluded from payment records. Contemporary AI systems, the authors suggest, extend this lineage: African music can be extracted, commodified and circulated by Global North companies without credit or compensation to the communities whose cultural labour sustains the systems. Legal cases sharpen the concern. The singer Asha Bhosle took her dispute with AI platforms to the Bombay High Court after her voice was used to train models without permission, and South African singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka announced legal action after her voice and image appeared in an AI-generated advert without her consent.

Opacity compounds the problem. Companies rarely disclose which recordings and datasets are used to train their models. Suno’s training practices came to light only through legal proceedings, which revealed the use of millions of songs, including copyrighted material, yet no publicly accessible song-level training registries or comprehensive model cards exist. Without transparency, African artists cannot know whether their work has been used, seek attribution, or consent to or refuse its inclusion. Meanwhile, large language models used for lyric writing exhibit their own biases: research presented in 2024 found that ChatGPT displays musical ethnocentrism, consistently rating African and Asian musical cultures lower than Western ones. Since most AI music generators operate only in dominant languages such as English, vernacular expression with spiritual and emotional significance is excluded, a serious concern given that the United Nations estimates an indigenous language becomes extinct every fortnight.

The economic stakes are considerable. An Amapiano artist in South Africa using today’s AI tools would find the platforms struggling to produce the local sound, while an American pop artist receives an effective creative assistant, reinforcing Western music’s commercial dominance. The existing market disparity is stark: South Africa’s recorded music market stood at roughly US$82.5 million in 2024 against US$17.67 billion in the United States. The Southern African Music Rights Organisation has warned that blurring lines between human creation and algorithmic imitation could undermine the epistemic authority of local musicians, and the South African Cultural Observatory has reported creative workers’ fears of a new data colonialism, in which multinational companies extract value from Africa and sell back commodified versions.

The authors are careful to note that the mere existence of AI music systems does not automatically cause epistemic injustice, and that artists can theoretically opt out. But market incentives, algorithmic recommendations, streaming playlists and publishing norms create what they call a soft, indirect compulsion that shapes which music is considered credible. Their proposed remedies include mandatory transparency about training data, independent audits and standardised benchmarks for evaluating how AI represents non-Western traditions, community-consent protocols, collective licensing and benefit-sharing arrangements that recognise communal rather than individual authorship, and capacity building so African communities can train their own systems and exercise epistemic authority over how algorithms understand their culture. The study, being an integrative literature review rather than empirical fieldwork, acknowledges its conceptual limits, but its message is urgent: algorithms are not neutral, and without deliberate intervention, AI music platforms risk becoming the latest chapter in a long history of silencing African knowledge.

Subject of Research: Epistemic injustice in AI-generated music and its impact on African indigenous musical knowledge systems

Article Title: Turn down the volume! How AI music platforms carry out epistemic injustice and silence African traditions

Article References: Maisiri, J., & Ncube, A. T. (2026). Turn down the volume! How AI music platforms carry out epistemic injustice and silence African traditions. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03327-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03327-9

Keywords: artificial intelligence, AI music generation, epistemic injustice, African music, indigenous knowledge systems, cultural bias, algorithmic bias, digital colonialism, Miranda Fricker, training datasets, music industry, AI ethics