Textbook inspires professor’s AI-enabled ‘academic trance’ album

A British professor who has turned his latest book into a Europop dance album is hoping his genre of “academic trance” will engage new audiences with scholarly research.

To bridge the gap between the lecture theatre and the dance floor, Andrew Hudson-Smith has released a 10-track concept album titled Place and Space based entirely around his recent Routledge textbook, Cities in the Metaverse.

Each song features lyrics written by Hudson-Smith, professor of digital urban environments at UCL, on a chapter theme, then a 1990s-style Eurotrance backing track generated by the artificial intelligence platform Suno.

Released on Spotify and all major streaming services under the electronic artist’s name Digital Urban, the LP has already attracted attention online with the album preview watched 68,000 times on YouTube so far this month.

With the book exploring futuristic concepts of digital twins, virtual reality, mirror worlds and virtual urbanism, translating chapters into 1990s-style trance bangers made sense, explained Hudson-Smith, who co-authored the original academic book with digital urbanists Duncan Wilson and Valerio Signorelli.

“The idea of living simultaneously in physical ‘place’ and digital ‘space’ felt inherently musical to me,” he said.

“I wanted to take ideas like simulation theory and urban data modelling – things usually reserved for university seminars – and turn them into something you can feel physically on a dance floor,” he explained, describing it as “brain food set to 130 BPM”.

While some chapter titles  (“Play the game of life”, “Mirror worlds”, “Utopia”) had lyrical promise, Hudson-Smith worried that others such as “Covariance matrix” and “Digital habitation” might not lend themselves to musical form.

“But I was shocked at how well they worked once I’d wrapped the musical track around the lyrics,” he told Times Higher Education.

“I’ve shared the album with a couple of professors and the reviews have been great so far. I thought people might be a bit sniffy about it but one academic said they ‘loved it’ and another said the lyrics are ‘almost poetic’,” he added.

Hudson-Smith, who lives in rural Norfolk and wrote the lyrics on his “very long and dull” train rides into London, said he had also won praise when he played it at his village hall. It has even inspired one listener to make their own album.

“One of the villagers, who is 80, has an album coming out next week and it is actually really good,” he explained.

Acknowledging his controversial use of the AI music generation platform Suno – criticised by musicians for its creation of “AI slop” – Hudson-Smith said academics should raise awareness of how AI tools could be used effectively in different ways to bring research to wider audiences in more accessible formats.

“These things are often labelled AI slop but, with the right musical choices, it’s worked out well,” he said, adding that Place and Space is “not just an album but an auditory roadmap for our increasingly virtual future”.

“It proves that deep thought and high energy are not mutually exclusive.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com