Interdependence II

Generativity, material agency, wayfaring, liveness

As part of my reframing (Smith 2024), I identified generative processes as a possible tool for heightening performer-felt meaningful interactions in electroinstrumental improvisation (Emmerson 2013, 6).

The primary reason for my introducing of generativity into my system design was to hand more agency to the machine (I use the word ‘machine’ here to refer to an assemblage of technologies, analog or digital, hardware or software, that constitute an interactive system. In my case, this is my computer running Ableton and Max for Live).

Generativity provides the kind of indeterminacy that I had been seeking as an alternative to direct control of the machine through one-to-one control mappings. In essence, generativity imbues the machine with behaviour which, according to Gibson, affords behaviour from the human in return - the most elaborate of affordances (1977, 76).

Generative processes, which Robert Henke describes rather uninspiringly as “something that runs” (Butler 2014, 220), can be considered in one sense static – once started, they exist and require no further input from the agent that instigated them (“an ambient, almost objectlike presence”) – but, as Gibson suggests, they also “invite dynamic action on the part of the performer” (Butler 2014, 220).

Why am I interested in indeterminacy and how this can be achieved through generativity? Well, material agency “comes at us from outside the human realm and cannot be reduced to anything inside that realm” (Pickering 1995, 6), so it follows that it is the otherness of sound produced in this way that makes it engaging to improvise with.

According to Pickering’s concept of the dance of agency, material agency only manifests once a machine has been constructed, during a period of human passivity. The machine may then be refined if it does not perform satisfactorily (1995, 21–22). In the case of interactive systems for electroinstrumental improvisation, the human cannot revise the system without first engaging with the machine’s agency: improvising with it, and discovering the emergent “possibilities of practice” (Kaiser 2018, 91) enacted from human and material performance. Clark observes that it is from these exchanges of agency that meaning and understanding emerge (2003, quoted in Kaiser 2018, 91).

In this system, the guitar signal is delayed and then fed into Max for Live’s Feedback Network device. Little documentation exists for this device, aside from a sentence in a legacy page on the Cycling ‘74 website, which explains that it contains five independent feedback units, each with their own bandpass filter and delay line. The output from each unit can then be routed to any of the others (‘Pluggo for Live’, n.d.).

Once activated by the guitar signal, the device begins to run, generating a continuous, complex, changing web of feedback spanning a wide frequency range. Randomisation parameters are available and I control several of these with an expression pedal, again foregoing direct control of individual parameters in favour of control over the overall intensity of the system. For Butler, this experience is like “riding” the sound: “processual and continuous”, involving “motion, but is not necessarily goal-motivated (Butler 2014, 220–21). This aligns very much with Ingold’s wayfaring (Ingold 2016, 77–80).

A happy consequence of incorporating generative elements into a system was the emergence of different modes of agency for me in performance. Butler writes of the laptop musician’s ability to “step outside a sound” while it is being made (2014, 106), an option not available to acoustic musicians, who must be continuously involved in sound production for there to be anything to listen to. Here, the wayfaring improviser analyses the sonic terrain as it reveals itself, and travels along it in response to this monitoring (Ingold 2016, 78), “determining if, when, and how it should change; and thinking about what sort of sound…should follow next” (Butler 2014, 106). Importantly, my agency does not disappear when I choose to step outside of the sound – it is still happening – but I can change direction in response to my analysis of the terrain at any time.

This leads me to questions about liveness in electroinstrumental improvisation. Liveness has been a topic of much debate in the general discourse around electronic and electroinstrumental music performance (Auslander 2023; Croft 2007; Emmerson 2007; Sanden 2013), with recent scholarship recognising it as fluid concept (Auslander 2023, 3) with various shadings according to the relationships of various categories of liveness within a performance (Sanden 2013, 31–33).

Of course, a performance of the kind documented above witnessed by an audience is an example of traditional liveness as described by Sanden (“a musical performance that was experienced in person” (2013, 3)). In the search for performer-felt meaningful interactions however, I align my work with his relocation of the site of liveness from the audience to the perceiver more generally (of which the performer is one (Sanden 2013, 9). Liveness emerges from “dialectical tensions between the conceptual categories of performance and electronic mediation, with both categories remaining equally and vitally “in the mix””, producing a network of liveness (Sanden 2013, 10–12).

References

Auslander, Philip. 2023. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Third Edition. London: Routledge.

Butler, Mark J. 2014. Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition In DJ and Laptop Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Croft, John. 2007. ‘Theses on Liveness’ 12 (1) (2007–04): 59–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771807001604.

Emmerson, Simon. 2007. Living Electronic Music. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

———. 2013. ‘Rebalancing the Discussion on Interactivity’. In Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference. Lisbon.

Gibson, James J. 1977. ‘The Theory of Affordances’. In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by Robert Shaw and John Bransford, 67–82. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Ingold, Tim. 2016. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

Kaiser, Jeff. 2018. ‘Improvising Technology, Constructing Virtuosity’. Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas 13 (2): 87–96. https://doi.org/10.11144/javeriana.mavae13-2.itcv.

Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

‘Pluggo for Live’. n.d. Accessed 16 February 2025. https://docs.cycling74.com/legacy/max5/vignettes/core/live_resources_pluggo.html.

Sanden, Paul. 2013. Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology and the Perception of Performance. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Tom. 2024. ‘Reframing: Liveness, Interactivity and Sympathetic Transformations’. Tom Smith’s Substack (blog). 1 September 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p-148075890?source=queue.