Engaging with Sonic Emergence: Cybernetics, Generative AI, and Distributed Agency in Posthuman Music

This doctoral project investigates posthuman music-making through a practice-based framework in which the composer-performer, also acting as system designer, operates alongside sonic feedback and generative AI as interacting agents within a shared musical environment. Across diverse practices including electronic lutherie, system design, context engineering strategies, composition, performance, and installation, the project examines how this distributed agency can be articulated. 

Drawing on cybernetics as both the transdisciplinary study of feedback and a foundational discipline for developing Artificial Intelligence, the project treats feedback as an active, circular process through which sonic information is continually redefined. AI, not only in its generative form, is introduced for its potentially high degree of autonomy in decision-making and intervention. Depending on its role within the system, AI can generate, transform, evaluate, or respond to musical information, with a behavioral range extending from strategic and utilitarian applications to more tactical, unorthodox, and creative ones. By approaching it as a system capable of such a wide range of actions, AI becomes part of the feedback processes through which musical decisions and actions are continually altered. The three agents are thus coupled in the shaping of sound and music, introducing perturbations into a process otherwise largely determined by the composer-performer's decisions. Their coupling creates a tension between intentional action and unpredictable deviation, expanding artistic expressivity while remodulating each agent's decisions and actions. This continuous interplay shifts the focus from the individual contributions of each element towards the outcome of their actions as an emerging, irreducible whole, which becomes the central subject of the investigation. 

The inquiry is further informed by historically relevant theoretical and practical frameworks: the notion of "performance ecosystem," which brings performer, instrument, and environment together as parts of a layered sonic feedback system, and the project's core Deleuzian framework of Assemblage Theory. The former represents an instance of a second-order cybernetics approach from which, and with which, the coupling of the agents can be understood and developed. At the same time, the latter converges with cybernetics at a higher level of abstraction. Both approaches provide ways of understanding emergence, and thus musical form, as a property of a whole that cannot be reduced to the sum of the individual elements composing and performing it. In doing so, the research challenges both the exclusive attribution of agency to individual subjects and the traditional notion of the musical work, aspiring to pave the way towards posthuman music.