Why Do We Want Our Computers to Improvise?
GEORGE E. LEWIS · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
Will you be replaced by a machine? Can music express things beyond words? This chapter discusses developing interactive computational systems that have degrees of autonomy, subjectivity, and uniqueness rather than repeatability. Interactions with these systems in musical performance produce a kind of virtual sociality that both draws from and challenges traditional notions of human interactivity and sociality, making common cause with a more general production of a hybrid. This leads into the question of whether computers can evince agency. The chapter concludes that what is learned from computer improvisation is more about people and the environment than about machines.