Minds and machines: Creativity, technology, and the posthuman in electronic musical idioms.

摘要

This dissertation is a study of creativity, technology, and the posthuman in contemporary electronic music-making. The posthuman is understood as the meeting point of humans and machines that reconfigures humanistic conceptions of the autonomous, creative self. From a posthuman perspective, the discourses of technoculture (comprising the concepts of control, transcendence, virtuality, mutation, and distributed cognition) suggest a means of interpreting a range of electronic musical practices, aesthetics and technologies. The dissertation proposes the posthuman both as a theory of musical technoculture and a framework through which to understand the actions and ideas of musicians who work within it. Over a range of historical, musico-analytical, theoretical and ethnographic case studies, I loosely draw on the discourses of technoculture to interpret the musical and social meanings of the mind-machine nexus in electronic musical practices over the past half-century. My findings suggest that the ubiquitous tools of the electronic musicians---notably, the digital technologies of computers and software, but also including older technologies such as tape recorders and the Chinese I-Ching---impact how musicians think about and actualize creativity and the idea of what is human. In sum, the mind-machine nexus foregrounded in electronic musical idioms is a productive site for understanding the contours of an emerging techno-musical cultural imaginary where the human becomes posthuman through its reconfiguration in machine terms.