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instruments, effects, orchestration, and more recently through the shared use of soft-
ware and audio samples.
As well as offering immediate presence on stage, then, Live Algorithms can also
involve forms of musical presence occurring at this cultural time scale. The
OMax
system of Assayag et al. (
2006
), for example, can load style data, and can be used to
generate such data through analysis. Here is a powerful new form of culturally trans-
missible data—style, encoded for use by a generative system—which can spread,
evolve, and potentially accumulate complexity through distributed cultural interac-
tion. In this way a system such as
OMax
offers a potential mechanism for bringing
a less immediate kind of agency to Live Algorithm performance, reducing the bur-
den of proof through mirroring, although not necessarily achieving the cognitive
sophistication of human musical negotiation. In general, a medium term goal for
Live Algorithms research may be to find formats in which behaviour can be ab-
stracted and encapsulated in transferrable and modifiable forms, such as file formats
that encode styles and behaviours.
Bown et al. (
2009
) categorise this interaction as memetic agency, an agency
that applies outside of an individual performance, which complements performa-
tive agency and makes sense of it by accounting for the musical innovation that did
not happen there and then on stage. Memetic agency adds an additional temporal
layer to the taxonomy of systems presented in Sect.
6.3
, which are focused on the
timescale of performative agency, by requiring terms for the dynamical change of
the elements
P
,
Q
and
f
, the initial conditions of each system, and the configuration
of interacting elements, from one system to the next.
The term “memetic” refers loosely to numerous forms of cultural transmission.
By strictly focusing on the performative agency of Live Algorithms, all aspects of
memetic agency would appear to be left to the algorithm's designer or user: a hu-
man. And yet this agency can be critical to understanding a performance. At the
extreme, pop singers who mime are almost completely unengaged from the act of
musical performance, and yet memetic agency allows us to make sense of such per-
formances. In musical styles such as jazz, much structure is already mapped out
and can easily be hard-wired into a Live Algorithm's behaviour, and yet the musi-
cal style itself is emergent, not coming from a single human originator, but through
repeated listening, copying and mutation. Software is rapidly become a part of this
emergent social process. Today, hard-wiring is inevitable at some level in Live Al-
gorithm design, and Live Algorithms designers, as creative practitioners themselves,
can gauge the relevance of such factors in specific musical styles and performance
contexts. There is nothing wrong with hard-wiring style into a system, and expecting
it still to be creative.
However, as the origin of the term implies, memetic agency encompasses a no-
tion of cultural change in which individual humans are not the only agents. Dawkins'
original use of the term
meme
referred to a fundamental unit of cultural reproduc-
tion, comparable to the biological unit of the gene (Dawkins
1976
). As contem-
porary evolutionary theory emphasises, human agency is predicated on the service
of genetic success, and is not an intentionality in and of itself. Memes are just an
equivalent hypothesised cause in service of which human behaviour can be ma-
nipulated. Individuals may aspire to achieve a more idealised intentionality in the
