Abstract
Contemporary thought is moving away from the notion that the human is a clear-cut concept. In particular, non-anthropocentric views are proliferating within the interdisciplinary area of critical post-humanism, with emphasis on non-dualistic views on relations between human and technology. This article shows how such a view can inform electroacoustic and computer music practice, and sees improvisation linked with composition as a fruitful avenue in this. Following a philosophical preparation and a discussion of relevant music discourse, two computer music works created by the author are discussed to demonstrate a model of music-making that merges composition and improvisation, based on the concepts of cognitive assemblages and intra-action, following the writings of N. Katherine Hayles and Karen Barad, respectively. The works employ techniques related to artificial intelligence and cybernetics, such as machine learning algorithms, agent-based organisation and feedback systems. It is argued that acousmatic sound is an important aspect of this practice. The research is thus situated not only in the frames of improvisation practice and music technology but also within spatial acousmatic composition and performance.
Highlights
Since technology has a distinct role in defining the constraints and potentials of improvisation in electronic music, technical preparation often becomes an important aspect of an improviser’s performance practice
That comes at a cost: a human performer in such a context can have a great degree of intuitive, bodily agency and influence on sound, but will have to sacrifice some control of some of the music as well, because much of it generated by a computer algorithm
Rosch and Thompson 2016; Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Clark 2008), Hayles takes specific interest in technological systems within cognitive assemblages, and ‘the implication that arrangements can scale up, progressing from very low-level choices into higher levels of cognition and decisions affecting larger areas of concern.’. She explains that, ‘because humans and technical systems in a cognitive assemblage are interconnected, the cognitive decisions of each affect the others, with interactions occurring across the full range of human cognition, including consciousness/unconscious, the cognitive nonconscious, and the sensory/perceptual systems that send signals to the central nervous system’ (2017: 118)
Summary
Since technology has a distinct role in defining the constraints and potentials of improvisation in electronic music, technical preparation often becomes an important aspect of an improviser’s performance practice. The blurring of distinctions between design, technology and composition is, as Thor Magnusson has written, almost innate to electronic and digital musics: The instruments become epistemic, composed, often directly fusing the instrument with the composition, as exemplified in the work of David Tudor, Gordon Mumma or Erkki Kurenniemi; where the instrument constitutes the piece, for example in the work of Éliane Radigue or Morton Subotnick; or where a specific technique becomes the theory and aesthetics of a new piece, as with Stockhausen or Xenakis’ (Magnusson 2019: 57) This has consequences for how we view improvisation in relation to composition. I will discuss two works – Texton Mirrors and Intraaction – to demonstrate theory in practice
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