Technoscientific
Practices of Music;

Music Technology Research, Its Publics and Its Discontents

Owen Green

This talk will reflect critically on the aspirations and outcomes of a recent five-year musical techno-scientific project ... called Fluid Corpus Manipulation, and use this reflection as a springboard to thinking about the nature of the publics that Music Technology research addresses. This project's focus was on putting signal processing and data scientific tools into the hands of creative coding musician-researchers, and so the impulse is to frame thinking about it in terms of its techno-scientific productivity: what tools, artifacts, theories, and so on came out of the research. What happens if instead we think of it as an episode of cultural production, specifically musical cultural production? I'll argue that from such a framing what emerges a renewed impression of Music Technology's incoherence as a research field, and that one dimension of this incoherence is in who the 'publics' for this research could be, and that confronting such a question offers possible escapes from tendencies towards techno- and market-fatalism, as well as a richer basis through which to think about our accountability as researchers. +

HCI meets AI in Live Coding: A Practitioner's Perspective

Anna Xambó Sedó

Live coding can be seen as an improvisational practice that uses code to express ideas.... The potential of using AI in live coding is promising but the consequences are still unclear. This talk will reflect on the possibilities of AI in live coding as well as the potential role of live coding in the age of AI based on the lessons learned from using MIRLCAuto, a constrained live-coding environment in development by the author. MIRLCAuto works as a customisable sampler of crowdsourced sounds empowered with machine learning. The talk will focus on discussing the relevance of adopting HCI strategies to help understand the system’s behaviour. Three salient aspects will be considered: the interactional space between human agency and machine agency; interactive machine learning connected to ownership and transparency of the system; and the live-coding practice as a research tool. +

(Dis)Embodied Mechatronic Displays for Telematic Performance

Michael Gurevich

Chamber musicians use a variety of bodily movements to coordinate their performance and evoke meanings for audiences,... ranging from subtle expressive gestures to large-scale synchronization cues. In an ongoing practice-led project involving a series of design experiments and public workshop performances, we are attempting to efficiently sense, encode, transmit, and display relevant movement features using 3-dimensional mechatronic displays to support musicians performing telematically—in disparate geographical locations using high-quality audio streamed over the Internet. The unfolding process of developing performances with these systems has shed light on musicians’ ability to form fluid and flexible relationships with mechatronic systems, which can be considered on a continuum between passive kinetic sculptures and embodied robotic avatars. This process has prompted intriguing questions about the degrees of agency, autonomy, and anthropomorphism we ascribe to materially embodied representations of ourselves and others. +

Postphenomenological Reflections on Otherness and Artificial Intelligence in a Musical Instrument; an Exploration of Relationalities Between Hands and Giving out of Hand.

Laurens van der Heijden

The identification of human-technology relations (re)shapes our understanding,... activities and interactions we develop with digital musical instruments. In that vein, postphenomenology broadens our comprehension of more advanced configurations of digital musical instruments as agents or actors in music performances from a situated and embodied perspective. This presentation explores and questions how we can think about musical instruments -and playing them- in terms of relationalities. In line with this attitude of observation, digital musical instruments and musical instrument with artificial intelligence will be reflected. The fundamental tactile relationship with the instrument through the hands of the performer and the embeddedness in AI of the relationship between instrument, performer and sound lay bare fascinating multi-layered modes of ‘otherness’ (alterity) touching upon crucial questions on musicianship and transformative musical practices. Postphenomenology intends us to understand, beyond the dichotomy of the human and non-human, the relationship between humans, technology and the world. Thinking from the assumption that (technical) instruments -having become part of our perception- mediate how we relate to the world, a next step would be to understand musical instruments in a likewise manner. Navigating between the affordance of the materiality of interfaces, manual manipulation and extended creativity, these new musical instruments invite us to reflect on creating new sounds with AI in between these tactile hands and the aspect of giving out of hand of the musical process. +

Mutual Dependence and Interdependence Relationships with Intelligent Artificial Entities

Koray Tahiroğlu

The notion of intelligent entities, agency and autonomy that is implemented in artificial intelligence systems... used in music performances today does not imply super-powered omnipotence of a technology, but, as the title suggests, simply appears to be a part of the complex, social, mutual rather than an object of technology that is removed from the flow of the musical activity. In my talk I will discuss how co-creation practices in music make mutual dependence and interdependence relationships more explicit between human and non-human actors. To explore this co-creation concept, I will take as my starting point the studio sessions that we recorded live in March 2022 with an artificial intelligence musical instrument. These studio sessions present a way of composing and performing in which musicians have been directed to explore and re-construing their own experience in the relationship with each other and with the autonomous musical instrument. This presentation will suggest that such artificial intelligent entities become present to be agents or actors on the means of their fundamental creative acts in music. +

Data, Truth, and Intention in Creative Machine Learning

Rebecca Fiebrink

Machine learning algorithms are, fundamentally, tools for identifying and using patterns in data.... Conventionally, data is understood as capturing something “true” about the world, and ML models become a way to understand or harness that truth, for instance to make better decisions, or to generate new content conforming to complex conventions. Consequently, bias in data is seen as an undesirable corruption of the truth, and models capable of capturing complex patterns in bigger datasets are understood to be more useful. However, I will argue that it is useful to think about “data” not as something “true”, but as a sort of interface between people and machines. Data embodies and communicates a set of decisions about what one would like a computer to do, what content or behaviours are important, what resources are worth expending, and more. I’ll describe how this recognition can shape how we build interactions with machine learning, design user interfaces for working with ML and data, and reckon with concepts such as bias, scale, and generality in ways that are meaningful and distinct for practitioners in music and the arts. +

Views from the South: How Local Music Technology Practices from Latin America can Inform Sustainability

Adnan Marquez-Borbon

In this talk, I present some examples of local technological-based artistic practices emerging from different parts of Latin America... reliant on the reuse and re-appropriation of materials, as well as improvisation for their problem-solving. Specifically, I will discuss how sociocultural and economic contexts constrain such artistic activities, as exemplified by the Brazilian practice of gambiarra. I will further show how electronics recycling not only has become a necessity for sustainability, but has existed as a long-standing reality within these regions. As a result, this perspective has become ingrained within these cultures. Finally, I will suggest how mainstream music and arts technology practices can benefit these approaches emerging from Latin America. +

Open Panel Discussion

All speakers