Machines and Music: Instrumental Contributions to Bluegrass (original) (raw)

Music and Non-Human Agency (2017)

Post, Jennifer (ed., 2018), Ethnomusicology – A Contemporary Reader, Volume II, pp. 181–194. NY & London: Routledge., 2018

A well-known definition of music states that what we understand with this term may be subsumed under "humanly organized sound:" This was formulated by John Blacking (1973, 3) in his celebrated book "How Musical is Man?" His proposal, however, was not uncontested, and many authors have tried to complement, contradict, or reaffirm this idea of how the phenomenon music could be framed. What is of interest here is the adverb "humanly," because it limits musical action and appreciation to processes that are essentially human, thereby excluding non-human agency. In this chapter, I will explore how far "the human" can be essentialized in relation to music and in which sense agency beyond the human could be, or even has to be, acknowledged within this context.

Improvising Folk Songs An Inclusive Indeterminacy

Contemporary Music Review, 2021

Folk Song Lab uses interactive group sessions to explore different ways by which improvisation stimulates an attitude towards the song by which it is understood as a cognitive framework that is recreated by the singer in the performance moment. It takes its point of origin in certain conceptual qualities found in traditional folk song and improvisation, stimulated using flow-inducing concepts (Csikszentmihalyi 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Collins.) such as risk, mimicry, play and reorientation, and interpreted in musical terms and without written instructions. This empirical study uses particular developed improvisational methods reflecting traditional songs’ cognitive frames. The project raises questions regarding the influence of time in relation to how creativity and flow appear during improvising sessions. Some of the methods explored in the project, such as mirror singing, might be related to neuroscientific findings regarding the function of mirror- neurons, hence reflecting the possibilities for conceiving of human creativity in a collective way. Keywords: Folk Song; Improvisation; Cognitive Frame; Flow

The Ghost in the Music, or The Perspective of an Improvising ANT

Oxford Handbook of Improvisation Studies

The article begins with some historical context and reflection on improvising with technology and then turns to questions of distributed agency, explicating various levels of agency for technical objects and human beings as they relate to improvised performance. Next the article addresses the “extended mind” thesis in cognitive science as a means of exploring the ways in which human beings are correlated with culturally and technologically catalyzed interactional possibilities. Finally it ends with some speculation about how these theories could potentially shift our engagement with the study and practice of improvised music.

Computation, Creativity, and Improvised Music

Odradek Vol. VIII Num. 1, 2022

I investigate the intersection of the concepts ‘creativity’ and ‘computation’ in the context of improvised music. While these concepts are commonly thought of as opposites, I argue that they can be intimately interlinked when humans and computational systems contribute to improvised music performance. I take human creativity and computational creativity to be categorically different. However, computational creativity in improvised music may be grounded in a ‘knowing how’ to improvise computationally and may contribute to the distributed creativity of a human-machine performance system. The semantics of humans and computational systems are of different categories and their respective musical ‘purposefulness’ are also categorically different. However, these differences allow interaction; and when engaged in group improvisation both humans and computational systems can be engaged in contributing to a co-creative improvised music performance.

Playing in the Posthuman Band: Toward an Aesthetics of Intra-Action in Musical Leisure

Leisure Sciences, 2019

In this article we use ideas from theorists associated with the "new materialist" or "posthuman" turns in contemporary philosophy in order to challenge the conception of the musical subject posited in aesthetic contemplation advanced by what we term the "pedagogical music world," and to pursue the possibilities afforded by an aesthetics of intra-action exemplified in practices of the musical "jam." We return to ancient Greek conceptions of music and leisure (mousik e and schol e), mediated by posthuman theoretical concerns in an examination of the nature of musical affect to argue that an aesthetics of intra-action necessitates a distributed and immanent notion of musical agency rather than individual and tran-scendent one. Through this discussion, we attempt to trouble the ideas put forth by the pedagogical music world to illuminate leisure potential as imagined in the "posthuman band." ARTICLE HISTORY