The Missing Half of Music History | Gabriella Di Laccio | TED

The speaker highlights the historical underrepresentation of women in music, noting that only one melody by a medieval woman composer survives. Discovering an encyclopedia listing thousands of women composers, she began a project to document their work. This initiative evolved into a foundation that has now identified over 18,000 women composers. The speaker questions why, as a professional musician, she was unaware of this vast body of work, attributing it to the fact that nearly 90% of music heard is by men. She expresses concern that AI, learning from this biased data, is perpetuating this silence, missing half of humanity's creativity. The speaker advocates for recording and preserving both historical and contemporary underrepresented musical voices to ensure they become searchable, teachable, and integrated into future musical landscapes. She calls for tech companies to invest in completing musical catalogs, emphasizing that "we" now decide which voices survive and urging AI to learn from "all of us."