Live Electronics and the Dance of Agency: Negotiating Musical Expertise through Human and Non-Human Actors

In recent decades, Live Electronics has emerged as a new domain of musical expertise, characterized by prototyping of instruments and controllers, programming of musical systems, and creative and virtuosic use of electronics previously confined to studios and fixed media composition. The emergence of this musical form is a product of technological, scientific, and artistic developments that have facilitated real-time interaction with digital music technology. Live Electronics merges musical performers, technologies and practices from contemporary art scenes, popular music genres and creative coding environments.

In this article, I present findings from an ethnographic study of Live Electronics conducted at a Norwegian higher music education institution. Within this institution, Live Electronics takes form as a one-year program, where selected performers and composers learn to perform with creative use of digital music technology and constitute this human-machine interaction as a co-productive relationship. Drawing on Malafouri’s theory of material engagement, Pickering’s concept of the “dance of human and non-human agency”, and critical and STS inspired studies on artistic production, I trace the pedagogical and creative processes brought forward in the Live Electronics program and analyze the ways the musical expertise is practiced, mediated, and distributed through human and non-human actors inside the institution.

The article thus provides an in-depth understanding of the dynamics at play as new digital technologies and musical expertise seek legitimacy in higher music education institutions and within broader music communities.