Habits and Algorithms: Reconsidering Music Technologies
Peter Nelson · Contemporary Music Review · 2025
In thinking about music as a set of narrative frames within a technological setting, and in the context of recent advances in AI that allow the decomposition and generation of musical corpora, the inadequacy of traditional representations of both music and the technologies associated with music become apparent. Taking the Pragmatist view, in which living selves present as bundles of habit (James, Dewey), and acknowledging both the contributions of habit to 4E Cognition and the social implications of this view developed by Bourdieu in his notion of the habitus, this paper considers the narrative forces that shape and are shaped by musical experience in order to interrogate new methods of habit formation and creative process evident within contemporary digital art practices.