Abstract

Why is it that in experimental improvised music (EIM) anything can happen but hardly ever does? And if what musicians play is not determined in advance, what holds performances of EIM together? We address these twin questions through a combination of verbal dialog, recordings of a live performance of the Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, and comments on both. Drawing on theories of »participatory sense-making« in enactive philosophy, we show that while musical phenomena such as drones and grooves emerge from human interaction, they take on a life of their own as more-than-human agents. By enabling and constraining what »makes sense« in particular situations, these »emergent autonomous organizations« shape the (inter)action that gave rise to them, obtaining normative force. By the same token, however, they can also change according to musicians’ subsequent (inter)actions. EIM thus stages the emergence and transformation of norms in real time and illustrates how human action more broadly interacts with the more-than-human.

Credits

Music: (Musical) Ethics Lab 7 (excerpts). Splitter Orchester, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, and Christopher A. Williams. 4 October 2024, musikprotokoll festival, Graz.

Music recording and mix: Tad Klimp 
Voice recording: Anton Tkachuk

Acknowledgments

The research funding for this audio paper was provided by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as part of the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project, grant ZK93. Thanks to Deniz Peters and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback. 

Audio footnotes

[0:00] Peters (2012) asks a similar question, reflecting on how an improvisor’s cultivation of a particular practice (and within a particular milieu) functions to make improvisations much more “predictable” than popular conceptions tend to suggest.

[2:20] Musical recordings were taken from (Musical) Ethics Lab 7, the last in a series of artistic research workshops carried out by the authors with the Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in the framework of the four-year project (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics. For more information, see the project homepage: https://improv-ethics.net/.

[2:39] Borgo (2022), for example, describes improvised music’s systemic tendencies as syncing and swarming.

[2:58] Hagberg (2016) argues that collective improvisation cannot be reduced to the sum of the intentions of a group of individual, autonomous subjects, but instead reveals a »relationally intertwined« selfhood that displays an emergent, collective intentionality.

[3:06] »Enactivism« is a research program in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that argues that cognition is not just »in the head« but arises from dynamic interactions between an organism and its environment. Krueger (2009; 2011) has given an enactive account of music, while Bertinetto (2021) has applied enactive thought more specifically to improvisation. 

[3:08] »Participatory sense-making« (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007) is an enactive theory that emphasizes that the interaction between two (or more) agents in their environment also participates in the cognitive process with a form of emergent autonomy.

[3:29] Schiavio & De Jaegher (2017) argue that musicking is a prime example of participatory sense-making, where the music that emerges between the musicians both »shapes and is shaped by« the musicians’ decisions.

[3:47] Di Paolo et al. (2018) offer a detailed, participatory sense-making account of communication and language.

[3:58] De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007, p. 493) define a social interaction as:

the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced).

[4:02] McAuliffe (2021) notes that even a solo improvisation has a »conversational« structure, both in the sense that the music itself participates in a way that is not entirely under the control of the musician, and that the interaction between musician and music would be intelligible to another listener.

[4:35] Taylor (2016) argues forcefully against the idea that the meaning of words could be arbitrary or contingent, countering that words have a certain “rightness” acquired through their history, usage, and the network of qualities that they suggest.

[6:17] Roholt (2014) compares the experience of playing in a groove to driving in snow grooves, where one’s action is channeled by an external phenomenon, lightening the cognitive load.

[7:11] Gadamer (1986) notes that humans have a tendency to project rhythm onto an experienced series, suggesting that it plays a fundamental role in organizing experience. The performance of a groove could therefore be seen as an interaction between performer and listener, structured by the gravitational pull of the phenomenon of rhythm. Cf. Crowther (2009), who describes how pre-reflective attunement to phenomena such as figure/ground relationships structures the emergence and interpretation of meaning between aesthetic object and viewing subject in the visual arts.

[7:35] Bergamin and Williams (forthcoming).

[8:25] Bergamin (forthcoming) highlights the role of cultural norms and expectations in both facilitating and constraining an improvisor’s sense of what is possible to play, and argues that such socio-musical praxes reveal the ethical values of a community. See also Becker (2008).

[8:53] Bertram (2022). In other words, any musical impulse, such as a sustained tone or a rhythm, has the potential to become normative, but only subsequent actions and sounds can actually establish that impulse as a norm. Or, as Bertam states, impulses »provide affordances for norms that are only ever constituted through reactions« (p. 26).

[9:09] Husserl’s (1964) concepts of »protention« and »retention« describe how experience is temporally stretched from the past into the future. What we hear at this instant informs how we understand what we have been hearing to this point, and shapes our expectation of what we will hear next.

[9:33] Wittgenstein’s (2009) famous »private language argument« holds that words and concepts (and rules and norms more broadly) cannot be entirely private, because they gain meaning via their place in a network of shared practices. The coherency of any word/rule/norm can only be measured against public criteria.

[9:36] The short exchange on »glory« here is taken from Lewis Carroll’s (2009) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, where Humpty Dumpty claims – pace Wittgenstein – that he can choose whatever he wants his words to mean. Alice remains unconvinced.

[9:51] Humpty Dumpty’s claims have inspired much philosophical discussion, for example Davidson (1991), Attfield (1999).

[11:01] The notion of »swaying rhythms« recalls Keil’s (1987) concept of »participatory discrepancies«, whereby the feeling of a groove is created by a discrepancy between a sound’s placement and the hearer’s expectation. See also Iyer (2002), Doffman (2009).

[13:26] Repetition is of course a common way of establishing meaning in music, improvised as well as through-composed (cf. Gadamer, 1986). See Carvalho (2010) for an in-depth philosophical discussion of repetition in jazz.

[14:05] Our use of the term »more-than-human« diverges from much literature on the topic in that it does not deal explicitly with the material environment, technology, or interspecies communication (Cf. McKinnon et al, 2024). While these elements may play both a facilitating and constraining role in how improvisations unfold (Clarke and Doffman 2017; Wheeler 2018), the concept of »participatory sense-making« additionally suggests that emergent interactions – viz., the music itself, and musical phenomena like »groove« – have a form of more-than-human agency, and play a central creative role..  

[14:20] Many scholars and practicing improvisors have suggested different senses in which we might think of music as having “a life of its own”. See, for example, Nachmanovitch (1990), Borgo (2014), McAuliffe (2021), Høffding and Snekkestad (2021).

[14:36] Scholars of experimental improvised music (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, 2014; MacDonald and Wilson, 2020; cf. Lewis and Piekut, 2016) frequently make claims for its  relevance, ethical and otherwise, to practices and phenomena beyond the arts. In this audio paper we hope to have shown how music is not only a metaphor or model for extramusical application, but a culturally specific example of norms’ more-than-human character more broadly.