Co-Creative Spaces

People have always used new technology to experiment with new forms of music creation. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) suggest, however, that machines are on the verge of becoming viewed as more than mere tools—they are increasingly seen as co-creators. A major shift in the perspective of the public is already underway in the text and image domains. There is no reason to doubt that the stage is set for a shift also within sound and music. Historically, music technology research has tended to focus on the technical aspects of development. Thus, the canon of computer music literature is heavily focused on describing new technologies and their implications from a tool-oriented perspective. Now that it is becoming increasingly accepted to ascribe creative agency to technology itself, we wish to shift the focus away from the technology and towards the musicians influenced by it. Our vantage point is Co-Creative Spaces—an artistic research project that followed four musicians through a six-month-long collaborative process. The musicians created music by improvising with each other and with computer-based musical agents that were trained through machine learning to improvise in the style of the musicians. We wanted to explore what happens to musical co-creation when AI is included in the creative cycle. The musicians in the project are from Norway and Kenya—two countries with fundamentally different musical traditions. Therefore, there was an opportunity to examine how the collaboration could be affected by cultural biases inherent in the technology, and in the musicians themselves. In another publication (Thelle & Wærstad, 2023), these questions were examined through focus groups as part of two five-day workshops during the project in 2021–22. Analysis from this study revealed that the musicians moved between an understanding of machine as tool and machine as co-creator, and between the idea of music as object and music as process. These different interpretative repertoires were used interchangeably and painted a complex picture of what it is like being in the intersection between different musical and cultural paradigms. In the research project covered in this article, we gave the musicians an opportunity some ten months after participation in the practical part of the project to reflect upon how it had influenced their musicianship and impacted their views on creativity, ownership, cultural exchange, and technology in general. We analyse these retrospections with the goal of informing the overarching theme of reassessing the history of technology-based music.