The Extended Composer - Computers and Creativity - page 173

talking in the traditional sense: the creation of a static, determinate musical work ,
whose value is in virtue of its musical content rather than its means of production.
Though we will touch on ideas of improvisation, we wish to set aside performance,
interactive artworks, and group creativity, and focus on the common situation of
an individual artist, developing a body of work through computational means. We
will explore the partnership with generative computational systems from a number
of distinct perspectives, and outline some of the opportunities and hazards of such
partnerships.
In considering the practice of composing with semi-autonomous music software
systems, we wish to highlight two particular outcomes. Firstly, an interaction with
such systems can serve to actively extend and reshape our creative behaviours in
response to its own creative acts, encouraging unusual creative directions, or en-
abling actions which are otherwise unlikely. Secondly, by mirroring our own cre-
ative behaviours—either as a whole, in part, or through transformations—such a
tool can help us reflect on our own stylistic habits and tropes.
Though the capacity to alter innate human practices is not exclusive to digital
tools, we argue that computational methods enable more comprehensive and precise
support of an artist's behaviour. The analytical, generative and adaptive features
often found in these tools can offer new creative routes based on dynamic awareness
of context and past history, harnessing the powerful probabilistic capabilities of the
microprocessor.
These tendencies can change our relationships with tools and may reshape our
creative processes. This influence is possible if we accept that creativity is in-
fluenced by experiences and opportunities, including those driven by our internal
drives as well as by the network of instruments, methods and stimuli that we adopt.
Taking the thesis that the means by which we produce an art object impacts upon its
nature, it follows that amplifying the autonomy possessed by these means serves to
broaden the range of objects that we can produce. By observing the successes and
failures of this hybrid human-technology system, we can learn new ways of working
which may otherwise not have arisen.
In the mainstay of this chapter, we examine human-agent partnerships from sev-
eral perspectives, identifying a number of characteristic properties which distinguish
them from their predecessors in the non-digital world. Along the way, we formulate
a series of taxonomies which can be used to as a starting point to categorise different
forms of creative technological partnership.
Before doing so, we will take a step back and consider some theoretical building
blocks relating to tool use. We will later draw on these ideas in our discussion of
digital tools and interactive music systems.
7.1.1 Thinking Through Tools
People need new tools to work with rather than tools that 'work' for them. (Illich 1973 ,
p. 10)