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tradition of the enlightenment, and this is a common way to view musical perfor-
mance, but whether an individual had achieved such a feat would be hard to prove
and to explain.
Between this memetic view of objects as passive participants, secondary agents
in the terminology of Gell (
1998
), and their potential, through AI, to act as cre-
ative, human-like, active participants (primary agents). Live Algorithm design seeks
a spectrum of agency and influence, rather than a distinct split between the human-
like and the artefact-like. We expect to see this agency emerging not just on the stage
but off it as well.
6.4.3 Live Algorithms as Musicians
Given that musicians are accustomed to negotiation as a form of improvised musi-
cal practice, a Live Algorithm ought to allow musicians to be themselves. There is
no necessity to make direct contact through a control interface with the machine,
as represented by the unattended systems F and H in Fig.
6.1
; such contact might
undermine the relationship, both in the eyes of observers, and in fact in any claim
to machine autonomy. So, just as in the human world of performance practice, the
use of additional tools, novel instruments and experimental interfaces is a matter of
aesthetic choice, not practical necessity. Contact ought to be of a more profound,
conceptual, nature.
Live Algorithms allow human-machine interactions that preserve the “basic
agency relationships” (Godlovitch
1998
) we expect in performance. These relation-
ships are developed and expressed in the musical sound itself. Linkage between
agent and result need not be absent or vestigial as can easily be the case in the
complex, technical world of computer performance. Rather, sonic events operate at
different semantic levels, generating both musical affect and effecting communica-
tion between players.
Performers are customarily valued for their capacity to demonstrate skill under
constraints. This is true even of free improvisation, where the chief constraints re-
late to the higher-level aspects of group interaction already noted. Whatever is true
of human performers must be also be true of Live Algorithms, at least in the imag-
ination of other participants and observers. Arguably, a concert audience attributes
value to a performance empathetically, in accordance with Husserl's transcendental
concept of “intersubjectivity” (Husserl
1999
). Performers are recognised as sub-
jects who are themselves experiencing the world, so intentions and abilities can be
attributed to them by the observer, and a critical experience of musicianship and
technical accomplishment is experienced in proxy, that is, through empathy with
them. Even if the observer cannot play a violin they can develop an empathetic re-
action in observing it done, and this is arguably the foundation of the live music
experience.
Collective, participatory performance should be considered as a social medium
for participants and their audience alike, along with how we can expect Live Al-
gorithms to be regarded as social beings is a matter for imaginative speculation.
