Musical Agents, Agency, & AI: Towards a Phenomenological Understanding
Here’s the paper I presented at ICMC 2024 titled, Musical Agents, Agency, & AI: Towards a Phenomenological Understanding.
abstract:
Creating AI musical agents is an interest to many electronic music artists and researchers. This paper suggests a phenomenological understanding of “musical agency” determined by four criteria: in order to perceive a technological system as a collaborative agent it must (1) be perceived as separate from the user, (2) be surprising to the user, (3) be intended as a collaborative agent, and (4) mirror the user’s own musical intentions. Each criterion is explored through practitioners’ writings, with modular synthesizers as an example of using complexity to fulfill these criteria. The aim is to pursue a broad identification of “AI” in music technology towards any systems that fill the criteria, thereby avoiding definitions that use specific categories of algorithms or implementations.