Posthuman Music: Paradigm of the Post-Anthropocentric Turn

Paradox, Continuity, Evolution or Discontinuation?


I would like to explore the impact of the increasing prevalence of machines in artistic processes, and of the resulting distance of man from creative processes on music: are we seeing the death of art? Is it another form of art? What does posthuman music look like? In order to explore this subject, I decided to compose three musical pieces: the first one was done with ‘real’ recorded instruments. The second was produced with a digital audio workstation (namely, Logic Pro X), and was uniquely composed of notes created via MIDI technology and virtual instrument software – but I decided what notes were to be played. The third was done with the use of Max/MSP (a programming language and software tailored to new media creation), and I only specified a range of available notes, then the software created the rest based on programmed randomization. The fourth composition was not created by myself, as it is music created by Artificial Intelligence. 
I first saw these four songs as “phases”, situating them in a chronological and linear time. 
But I soon realized that this would not be the best way to organize my research. As illustrated by the map above, I believe it is extremely interesting to view my different songs not in terms of linear chronology, but maybe more as being part of an Aion time. Johnson wrote a book in which she tries to narrate the history of music in this way, in which she indeed states: "Music history might be understood better as a kind of variation form rather than solely in terms of linear development." (Johnson, 2015, 4)
I then conducted interviews with various participants in different settings, and asked them a few different questions about each song, without telling them anything about the project or how each piece was made. These interviews provided me with powerful insights on the topic. Listening back to their answers, I realized for instance that the interviewees did not perceive the AI-generated piece and the 'real' recorded composition as being far from one another. Insights such as these really helped me to detach myself from the linear perspective.
However, it is true that art (and maybe even more particularly music) is seen to be a deeply human process: technology and art seem at the first glance contradictory. I asked various people (as can be seen in this page) to define music, and a few words kept coming back: creativity, senses, emotions, "sentiments", spiritual, "produit de la vie", "âme" etc. Words that one automatically links to human processes. Nevertheless, Coeckelbergh justly asks: “What exactly is so special about us compared to machines? What do we mean when we say that humans can create ‘original’ art?” (Coeckelbergh, 2017, 287).
Of course, there is a general fear surrounding the increasing prevalence of machines in every domain, since as Coeckelbergh states: “the discussion about the artistic status of machine ‘art’ seems also part of a broader discourse and anxieties/enthusiasm concerning the question if machines will take over, if they will make humans obsolete in a lot, if not all, domains of previously exclusively human activities.” (Coeckelbergh, 2017, 287) This reminds me of what Braidotti calls the “techno-teratological”, which she defines as “negative tendency to represent the transformations of the relations between humans and technological apparatus or machines in the mode of neo-gothic horror.” (Braidotti, 2013, 64) Coeckelbergh indeed notes that it is not clear what keeps us from opening the domain of art to non-humans like machines and animals, “or what keeps us from recognizing that these are already ‘invading’ the domain.” (Coeckelbergh, 2017, 296) This apparent contradiction or tension is what I would like to explore, as ‘posthuman music’ embodies amazingly the tensions of posthumanism and Braidotti’s ‘complexity’. Is the human dragged further and further away from the actual creation through the increasing prevalence of machines in music-making? What if? As Mackey states, with new instruments come new possibilities and the “potential to create a new kind of music” (Mackey, 2015, 19) Does the merging of humans AND machines constitute the future of music? I believe that this would allow us to blur the lines between the humans and the non-human "other", and would allow for a post-anthropocentric turn, as it would put an end to human exceptionalism in art and in music. 
We are not using machines-as-tools anymore. As Kevin Lagrandeur (2018, 7) justly notes: “[The artist is] in conjunction or shared agency with a smart machine that itself has agency and is acting as an intelligent extension of the artist, as a smart prosthesis. This art is the product of a merging of human and machine action. The human is enhanced by smart technology, and the machine is given agency by the human. [...] the machine here is in some sense symbiotic, a smart collaborator with agency of its own operating with the human artist.” See the example of a voice without autotune and with autotune. Or Google's "Piano Genie".
As machines have a certain agency, post-human music blurs how we define “human”. Lagrandeur notes that we are witnessing a “radical merging of humans with machines so that the line between machines and human becomes blurred.” (2018, 5) We need to decenter man, and by taking this post-anthropocentric turn, a new body is created: a “networked, interdependent, contingent being” (Myers, 2013, 9) 
Regarding these cyborg figures, Donna Haraway suggests that “we are they” (Haraway, 1991, 180). This is extremely interesting as something similar to Haraway’s statement can be said of musical sounds and practices in which “boundaries between bodies and their extensions have been blurred,” in which we have come to “practice ourselves, materialize ourselves, in technological-aesthetic practices such as the making of music” (Wilson, 2017, 150) Through exploring these different posthuman sounds, we therefore need to keep in mind the agency and the embodiment of non-human things through the lens of their “shared-materiality” with humans, as well as “in the dispersal of the body onto other platforms”. (Isabella Sandes)
Hayles, an important figure in posthumanism, comes to the conclusion that: “the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history [...] In the posthuman, there are no essential distinctions [between] cybernetic mechanism and biological organism.” (Halyes, 1999, 2-3). Therefore “everything solid melts into the data stream – until it morphs into the cyborg.” (Kramer, 2013, 41).

 

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