Traces, Gestures and Hybridity in Electroacoustic Musical Improvisation

Conférence dans le cadre de la journée d’étude Borderscape Improvisations from Analog Music to Live Coding à l’Université de Pavie le 16 septembre 2024.

Traces, Gestures and Hybridity in Electroacoustic Musical Improvisation

Since Pierre Henry’s first experiments at the Paris RTF Club d’essai in the 1940s, improvisation has become a common practice in musique concrète and electroacoustic music. Improvisation is often an integral part of the creative process, from the initial stages of material elaboration, to the transformation of sounds and the creation of structures, to the final stage of mixing. Some DAWs even integrate it into their workflow, allowing for a back-and-forth between improvisation and composition: performance that mixes the two in forms of « comprovisation », or recorded production that incorporates the gestures of improvisation. The use of AI in music production has also elevated probabilities, random structures, or errors due to the cost of algorithms to a creative stimulus halfway between composition and improvisation. It now seems very difficult to distinguish between improvisation and composition in many electroacoustic music artists.

But whether improvisation takes place in the shadows of the studio or during a performance, it survives only in the form of traces: recordings, presets, captures, lists of gestural coordinates, instrument or device configurations, algorithms for music production environments, phonographic publications, and so on. These « hybrid objects » constitute what Yves Jeanneret calls « cultural beings »: objects that are subject to multiple transformations, that acquire cultural content through contact with the agents that create them, and that appear to us in multiple realities. For a scientist, beyond the ephemeral moment of performance, musical improvisation becomes a « hybrid cultural being » whose multiple realities must be analyzed. This is the emergence of a contextual digital musicology, localized to these beings that require specific methods, each trace of a performance becoming a particular case that requires new tools in the laboratory. But the analysis of these cultural beings is itself ephemeral and seems difficult to fix. How can we formalize these cultural entities? How can we observe them? Is it possible to establish a protocol for analyzing musical improvisation in a hybrid technology regime?

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