The problem, Addaquay contends, is not simply that the models fail to imitate surface sounds. They often succeed at that. The failure lies deeper, in what he calls sonic data coloniality: the processes through which musical cultures are collected, classified, abstracted, trained upon, generated and monetized within technological frameworks that remain overwhelmingly Western in design and control. The term extends the idea of data colonialism, developed by scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, into the sonic domain. Just as human experience has been harvested as raw data for capitalist extraction, African music is being scraped, compressed and recombined into a homogenized continental sound, one that serves global markets while the communities who created the traditions remain largely absent from the pipelines, the training data decisions and the profits.

The scale of the asymmetry is striking. Recent studies have documented that generative music models almost entirely omit the Global South. A 2024 preprint titled Missing Melodies found what its authors described as a nearly complete omission of non-Western musical traditions from major text-to-music systems, and follow-up work presented at NAACL in 2025 confirmed representational bias and poor cross-cultural adaptability in leading models. A bibliometric analysis of the first twenty-five years of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, the field’s main research community, showed that its authorship remains heavily concentrated at a Western center. Meanwhile, the commercial footprint of generative music keeps expanding: Deezer reported in April 2026 that AI-generated tracks already represent 44 percent of all newly uploaded music on its platform, meaning the biases baked into these models are now shaping the global soundscape at industrial scale.

Why do the models fail even when they try? The technical answer begins with training data. Large-scale music generation systems such as Meta’s MusicGen, Google DeepMind’s Lyria, Stability AI’s Stable Audio, Suno and ElevenLabs are trained predominantly on Western popular and classical recordings, a corpus that reflects existing licensing structures and internet availability rather than global musical diversity. African recordings, where they exist at all, are often locked in archives such as the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University, whose vast collections of field recordings have only recently been digitized. What little African music does enter training pipelines is frequently labeled under the catch-all category of world music, a classification that flattens thousands of distinct traditions, from Ewe agbadza drumming to isicathamiya choral singing to Yoruba talking-drum language, into a single undifferentiated label that the model then averages into stereotype.

The deeper technical difficulty is that many African musical systems encode knowledge that Western-derived representations struggle to capture. In many African tone languages, the pitch contour of speech carries lexical meaning, and songs frequently map melodic lines directly onto tonal patterns, so that singing the wrong melody changes the words themselves. Research on Northern Ewe music by musicologist Kofi Agawu, studies of Akan tone encoding across musical modalities, and work on the Yoruba gángan talking drum, which reproduces speech tones to communicate proverbs and names, all demonstrate that pitch, language and meaning are inseparable in these traditions. A generative model trained on spectrograms and tokenized audio has no representation of linguistic tone, no notion that a melodic interval might be a grammatical error. Similarly, West African polyrhythm and the standard bell pattern are not merely rhythmic sequences but networks of interlocking parts, microtiming relationships and dance implications that only make sense within a performance system.

Addaquay’s framework proposes a shift in how AI-generated African music should be judged. Rather than asking whether an output sounds authentic or pure, a criterion he rejects as essentialist, he argues for cultural competence: whether the system can produce music that is comprehensible within the cultural, linguistic and social systems that give the tradition meaning. Evaluation, he suggests, should examine vocality, tone-language relationships, rhythm, groove, microtiming, instrumental idiom, call-and-response structures, dance implications, social function, and the questions of consent and benefit-sharing that surround the data itself. Call-and-response in Ewe agbadza songs, for instance, is not a decorative texture but one element in a network of musical and social factors; a model that renders it as a static loop has reproduced the sound without the practice.

To make such evaluation practical, the article outlines a prompt-based and source-conditioned testing methodology. Generic prompts, such as a request for African music, reveal the model’s default stereotypes. Culturally specific prompts, naming particular traditions, instruments or social contexts, test whether the model can differentiate at all. Expert prompts, written with musicological precision, probe the limits of controllability. Source-conditioned workflows, in which users condition generation on rights-cleared African recordings, test whether the system can learn from a specific tradition rather than a continental average. Listening tests can then be structured using established subjective assessment protocols such as the ITU-R BS.1534 MUSHRA standard and web-based frameworks like WebMUSHRA, with evaluators drawn from the relevant cultural communities rather than from generic crowdsourcing pools. Live evaluation arenas for text-to-music models, now emerging in the research literature, could be extended with culturally stratified judge panels.

The governance dimension is as important as the technical one. The African Union has moved to assert continental control over the data and AI agenda, adopting a data policy framework in 2022 and a continental artificial intelligence strategy in 2024, and signing a partnership with the Music In Africa Foundation in 2025. International instruments are also converging on the issue: UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and its 2025 expert report on AI and culture, alongside World Intellectual Property Organization guidance on documenting traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, all point toward frameworks in which communities hold rights over their cultural data. Legal pressure is mounting elsewhere too, with musicians’ unions suing record labels over AI licensing and the Swedish collecting society STIM launching the world’s first AI license for music. Whether African musicians and institutions will hold equivalent leverage over the sonic data extracted from their traditions remains an open and urgent question.

Encouragingly, African-led initiatives are building the missing infrastructure. Large-scale multilingual speech corpora such as WAXAL, developed with Google Research, demonstrate that rights-cleared, community-aware African audio datasets are feasible at scale. Organizations including Masakhane, the African Languages Lab and Khaya AI are building African language technology from within the continent, and the CompMusic project has long argued for music information research organized around specific musical cultures rather than Western defaults. Scholars of decolonial AI, including work on epistemic sovereignty in African AI governance, argue that the goal is not to bolt African content onto Western systems but to reshape the taxonomies, evaluation criteria and ownership structures themselves. Addaquay’s own prior research on sub-Saharan singing styles, traditional dance accompaniment and music preservation in Ghana supplies the musicological grounding for that reshape.

The stakes extend far beyond academic debate. If AI-generated music continues its explosive growth, the sonic image of an entire continent will increasingly be produced by models that hear Africa through Western ears, trained on data extracted without consent, evaluated by metrics that reward surface resemblance and monetized by companies far from the source communities. Addaquay’s argument is that African music should enter AI systems not as a homogenized continental sound but through its distinct traditions, hybrid practices, performance expertise and cultural authorities. Cultural competence, consent and benefit-sharing, he suggests, are not constraints on innovation but the conditions under which musical intelligence can claim to be intelligent at all. The alternative is a future in which anyone can prompt for Africa, but almost no one, including the machines, actually hears it.

Subject of Research: Cultural bias and sonic data coloniality in generative AI music systems for African musical traditions

Article Title: Prompting Africa, hearing the West: generative AI music, sonic data coloniality and the future of culturally accountable musical intelligence

Article References: Addaquay, A. P. (2026). Prompting Africa, hearing the West: generative AI music, sonic data coloniality and the future of culturally accountable musical intelligence. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03345-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03345-7

Keywords: generative AI music, African music, sonic data coloniality, music information retrieval, cultural competence, AI ethics, dataset bias, text-to-music models, decolonial AI, tone language, call-and-response, benefit-sharing

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