Engaging with Sonic Emergence: Cybernetics, Generative AI, and Distributed Agency in Posthuman Music (researcher: Massimiliano Cerioni)
This doctoral project investigates posthuman music-making by combining human action, sonic feedback, and generative AI as agential forces within a single compositional–performative environment. Drawing on music research and cybernetics, feedback is understood as a circular redefinition of information across multiple dimensions occurring within system components and among higher-order systems. Within this framework, generative AI is itself integrated as a feedback-capable agent operating across creative, design, performing, and analytical layers—scoring, algorithm design, feedback conditioning, sound generation, perceptual qualification, and system evaluation. Rather than functioning as a tool, AI acts as an iterative interlocutor that introduces perturbations and reshapes system behavior during making. The research develops practices through which human, technical, and algorithmic agents engage via unstable and chaotic, yet workable, behaviors—such as thresholds, attractors, drift, and controlled uncertainty—with sonic and musical events emerging from their coupling rather than from preplanned execution.
Results
During the doctoral period, the research will be disseminated through public performances,
exhibitions, lectures, and presentations in artistic research and contemporary music contexts. Selected
works, procedures, and research findings will be documented and shared through conferences,
workshops, and peer-reviewed publications, as well as through practice-based formats like posters,
technical demonstrations, and online repositories. The doctoral outcomes aim to contribute enduring
reference points for composers, performers, and researchers working with feedback, generative
systems, and AI in experimental and posthuman music practices.
