Understanding Musical Practices as Agency Networks

This position paper proposes that creative practices can be usefully understood as agency networks. In particular it looks at interactive algorithmic musical practices and the takes a distributed view of the influences involved in such music making. The elements involved include humans, tools, culture and the physical environment that constitute a system or network of mutual influences. Such an agency network perspective is intended to be useful for the pragmatic tasks of designing new interactive music systems and developing new musical practices that utilise them. Drawing on previous research into generative music and computational creativity, various views on interactive music systems are canvassed and an approach to describing these as agency networks is developed. It is suggested that new human-machine musical practices may arise as a result of adopting an agency network perspective and that these, in turn, can drive cultural innovations.