Texas Tech Professor Integrates AI and Human Creativity into Education | September 2026 | Texas Tech Now | TTU

Hideki Isoda is using his combined interests in music and technology, including artificial intelligence, to lead the next generation into the modern world of music.

Hideki Isoda, an assistant professor of composition and director of media production in Texas Tech University’s School of Music, is an accomplished composer and music technologist who has found ways to create sound not just with typical instruments, but with motion-capturing sensors that use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate movements into sound in real time.

But long before the concept of AI entered his sphere, Isoda simply sought technology that would help connect him with his cousin.

Born on the same day, the two were more like brothers, but struggled to communicate verbally as his cousin lived with muscular dystrophy. 

The young Isoda, always captivated by what electronics could accomplish, developed a system that would allow his cousin to express his needs or feelings by pressing buttons. 

The success encouraged them to further explore what else they could devise. 

“It was really fun making some kind of mystical instrument, in a way,” Isoda said. “So, that was my first connection between technology and sound, and that triggered me into the music world.”

Soon after, he tinkered with synthesizers, musical instruments that produce sound through generating and manipulating electronic signals. Isoda’s fascination with combining technology and music thrust him into illustrious academic and musical careers in composition, computer programming and more. 

Along the way, his interest in music informatics, which combines the above topics into a comprehensive field, began to fold in the psychological impacts of music and access to creating it. This happened as his relationship with his now wife, Hyejin, a music therapist, blossomed.

She worked with people who wanted to play instruments but lacked the physical ability to do so due to missing appendages. Isoda began designing custom electronic instruments aimed at democratizing access and leaned into the therapeutic aspects of how and why sound and harmony make people feel better.

His devices use sensitive, accurate sensors to detect hand movements, convert the motions into data and translate it into sound, while incorporating step-by-step procedures, or algorithms, with AI that speed up the process.

“Most people these days talk about AI as something that emerged in the last three to four years,” Isoda said. “Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, I had the opportunity to study it very hard and develop algorithms using machine learning and deep learning by writing endless lines of code long before today’s AI tools made the process so accessible.

“Looking back, though, I think it was definitely fortunate because it gave me a much deeper understanding of what is actually happening underneath the technology.”

Now at Texas Tech, Isoda is leading the next generation of musicians, engineers and other interested students through his classes on composition and informatics. Both courses integrate coding and AI into the curriculum as important subjects to grasp while the music industry continues to evolve.

When teaching electronic composition, Isoda exposes students to a range of emerging technologies, including the generative AI music creation platform Suno. While not all students are inclined to use it, Isoda intends to ensure they are aware of the platform’s presence in music. He hopes the exposure helps students narrow down what they’re passionate about and enables them to pursue it.

His music informatics classes are where he goes into much further detail on AI. Over two days, Isoda lectures on what AI is and the various categories, including machine learning, which enables computer systems to sort information and make predictions or decisions without being programmed to do so. 

The class often contains a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, who learn the basics of informatics and coding and concepts they can achieve on the way to building hardware to be used for a final project. 

Machine learning plays a significant role in the intimidating coding process, where online AI tools can assist students in translating what they want to accomplish into machine learning code. 

Students often become increasingly engaged with the course concepts as they developed them into meaningful, feasible projects. Many choose to take Isoda’s class again, sometimes more than once, not because they have struggled with the material, but because their interest continues to grow and they want to explore the subject more deeply.

While the core curriculum remains consistent, returning students build on their previous experience, pursue progressively ambitious projects and broaden their understanding of potential academic and professional pathways.

“Suddenly, they know there are new possibilities,” Isoda said. “If you look at the music industry, there are, of course, musicians and teachers, but there are also people who design these kinds of instruments and technologies. The market for those is huge.”

Ali Balighi, a Doctor of Musical Arts student who Isoda advises, is intrigued by electroacoustic music, characterized by the use of recorded or synthesized sound, complex tones and nonlinear temporal structures.

In his composition and research, Balighi has explored the freedom electroacoustic music affords when creating unpredictable, interactive pieces for both performers and listeners. A believer that the environment is more of a cultural asset than a neutral background, Balighi has focused on using site-specific sounds and spatialization to introduce audiences to new places and perspectives, such as fish threatened by noise pollution. 

He and Isoda combined to write a paper about the role of AI in generating scores for electroacoustic music, which, unlike acoustic music, lacks a standardized notation system. They found several areas, such as audio transformation and real-time interaction, where AI could provide assistance, even for a format too creative and piece-specific to be defined by fixed notation.

Along the way as a master’s student in Isoda’s class, Balighi was impacted by Isoda’s willingness to look at various solutions collaboratively and consideration for technology’s ability to serve its users in a deliberate manner.

“What I really learned from him is that integrating AI into composition and notation is not about accepting one ready-made technical answer,” Balighi said, “but about staying curious and combining many human perspectives around the technology, so that we shape the AI rather than let it simply shape us.”

The embrace of AI on a larger scale in the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts (TCVPA) is led by Dean Martin Camacho, who in March invited former marketing executive and MKHSTRY.AI founder Jeff Charney to speak to distinguished TCVPA faculty and staff. 

Charney, also the brother of Mark Charney, director of the School of Theatre & Dance, is developing a creative ideation platform that aims to use the computing output and thought process of the human brain. He spoke to faculty about being disruptive, embracing change and seeking growth in their respective fields.

“His life has been dedicated to creativity, his life has been dedicated to what’s next,” Camacho said. “That aligns very well to what we do in the College of Visual & Performing Arts.”

Isoda feels strongly supported by the college administration and appreciates its receptivity to his work, particularly its recognition of how emerging technologies such as AI can not only help music composition and informatics but other artistic disciplines in the college.

He is mindful of the concerns surrounding AI but encourages his students to see it as a tool that can support and expand their creative practice rather than replace their craft. In that context, Isoda often shares the Japanese word kaizen, which means continuous improvement.

“It’s not about perfectionism, it’s about always encouraging yourself to improve things,” he explained. “That’s the beauty, the art of being human and the purpose of why we create.”