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Posthuman Music: Paradigm of the Post-Anthropocentric Turn

Music Logic

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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).
Midi Composition via DAWs: perfect equilibrium between human and machines?
"We don’t play music, we play programming." (Marshall McLuhan)
"We should consider non-human forms of creativity, and not only cases where either humans or machines create art but also collaborations between humans and machines, which makes us reflect on human-technology relations" (Coeckelbergh, 2017, 285)

Interviews

Technical aspect: this piece is also in C major, at 105 BPM, and in 4/4 time. It consists of five MIDI, or “Software Instrument”, tracks: one for the flute, one for the piano, and three for the drums (hi-hat, snare, and kick drum). All five tracks were recorded using a MIDI keyboard (better understood as a MIDI “controller”) which was connected to my computer via USB. Essentially, the controller sends MIDI messages, such as note on, note off, note velocity (i.e. intensity), pitch bend, note sustain, etc., to the computer. Logic, which was configured to be “listening” to these messages, retrieves the information and uses it to generate sounds. The sounds included in this piece are all sample-based – i.e. the sound produced when a MIDI message is received is a pre-recorded sample that is sold with the software. It is important to note that the notes originally played on the MIDI controller were then quantized – i.e. the notes were modified so as to be perfectly in time. This is largely why the music feels and sounds so “robotic” or “square” – because there are no rhythmic errors whatsoever. This process is illustrated by Lagrandeur (2017, 8) when he argues that “there are actually two creative processes at work here: the artist’s and that of the assemblage of smart technology. The fact that they operate symbiotically as one creative entity is posthuman”. The composition I made is intentionally robotic, simple, and rather unpleasant but every piece of music to come out for the past 20 years use MIDI protocols in one way or another and a lot of them use virtual instruments as well, just very good ones. As with the first piece, compressors, EQ’s, and reverbs were added to the tracks, to give the piece a bit more cohesion.

Is the use of DAWs, and virtual studio technology, the real post-anthropocentric turn? Is it why it was so detested by all of my interviewees while it is the exact same melody as the ‘instrumental’ song? Does it constitute the “movement of the human to the posthuman, [the] cyborgian connection between performer and circuity” (Van Veen, 2002, 6) As Wilson (2017, 148) states, technology renders the sounds “neither familiarly human nor simply that of the nonhuman.” Pepperell further argues that “[Post-human] refers to the general convergence of biology and technology to the point where they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable” (Pepperell, 1995, IV). Indeed, for art to be considered post-human, there must be a collaboration between technology and biology (machines and humans). And as Kirby (2012) notes, musicians’ reliance on DAWs is a great place to raise the question of machine and human collaboration. Is the relationship between the human in front of his computer and his computer purely a master-slave relationship? I would argue, similarly to Kirby, that despite the relationship containing some elements of a master-slave relationship, as the human still has a more controlling input, “both the individual and the software are working together to create a piece of art.” Kirby takes Ableton Live as her example of a DAW, which is extremely similar to Logic in its functioning, and she argues that this software “can be seen as emblematic of post-human technology, as using such a program can be seen as a convergence of human and machine which results in a creative output.” The human alone would not be able to create this piece of art, and neither could the machine. On Ableton Live 8's website, we could read “If you’d rather be “making music” than just “using music software,” Ableton Live is for you”. As Kirby notes, the distinction between “making music” and “using music software” made it clear that the designers of the software set out to produce a program that went further than just allowing the user to produce music: ; “the software also contributes to the production of the piece, along with the individual using the program.” (Kirby further notes the egalitarian aspect of these kind of software: one can create musing using only a computer, with no need of buying actual instruments: this “revolution in music production can be attributed to advancing technology, which is essential to a post-human society.”) Kirby concludes that “Digital Audio Workstations could be seen as emblematic of a post-human society, as the technology involved will always rely on human/machine collaboration to produce a piece; Ableton Live [and Logic Pro] cannot produce a piece of music by itself.”
Neither can MAX/MSP: what are the defining features of the two? What do they share? When Lagrandeur (2018, 6) states: “today’s tools are much more complex than hammers and axes, and their design is such that it is often hard to tell where the tool ends and the human begins. The tool itself may be far from an inanimate thing; it might be a computer that makes decisions in conjunction with the artist or on his or her behalf”: here, we truly realize the potential of a collaborative approach between humans and machines, and we see the strong creative capabilities of some digital instruments.
As mentioned earlier, I believe Braidotti to be right to mention a techno-teratological aspect. But I think that the use of DAWs draws this ‘competitive’ angle away from the discussion of humans and machines – they can co-create. (Coeckelbergh, 2017, 297) Machines are no threat to human creativity anymore as they help us to be more creative than we would be without them.