Technology, creativity, and the social in algorithmic music

This chapter analyses algorithmic music from the perspective of social and cultural theory. It surveys developments in the sociology of art that have sought to bring aesthetic theory into contact with classic sociological critique, and it surveys theories of mediation - particularly those that have sought to more fully account for the roles technical devices play in creativity. To this end, the chapter considers Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a means to analyse the contributions of ‘non-human actors’ to the social world of algorithmic music. Two case studies are then discussed: first, the activities of the Bay Area algorithmic music pioneers, The Hub; and second, the group of musicians and artists centred around the practice of Live Coding. The example of The Hub raises the question of the relationship between technological change and artistic innovation. It argues that the external forces that bear on the instrumentarium of highly-technologised forms like algorithmic music should be considered as part of their social ecology. The analysis of Live Coding focuses on the way associated actors make use of the internet and world wide web both as a creative, communicative and social medium. It charts the online development of the TOPLAP manifesto to illustrate how, far from being a technological determination, the ‘true’ computer music that live coding seeks to articulate is an ongoing social negotiation that continues up to the present. The final section uses the Issue Crawler software to analyse networks of association within live coding in order to better understand the genres wider social makeup. I argue that the large-scale social, cultural, economic and political forces that sustain the field bear strongly on the aesthetic and conceptual terrain of the scene, particularly in regard to the genre’s careful negotiation of its relationship to ‘art’ and ‘popular’ histories of electronic music.