“Which side are you on?”: Some thoughts on roles and meanings in improvised music.

In this paper I want to interrogate the standpoint from which the participants in improvised music performance come into view, and to ask whether recent thinking, about the ways in which humans, other animals, and objects and machines can relate to each other, is able to provide us with new possibilities for thought and action in improvisation. I also want to consider briefly the ways in which notions of time and rhythm, which are so central to music, are implicated in the discourses surrounding “post-humanism” and “vital materiality”, and to see how these discourses, which seek to radically reorient our view of social connection, might help to illuminate some of the aesthetic issues of improvisation, particularly involving humans and new technologies. I will try to approach this discussion through the theme of ‘listening’, and in particular through the identification of listening as a type of social action.