The methodological approach that emerged through my development of the Triaxis model and this exposition can be described as hybrid artistic research, combining principles of Research-Creation and Distributed Creativity.
Research-Creation
Research-Creation, as defined by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), is "an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms).
(Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council., (n.d.))
Stévance and Lacasse writes about recherche-création in their "Research-Creation in Music and the Arts" (Stévance & Lacasse, 2013), where they present several statements regarding what constitutes this methodology within artistic research.
In regard to their views that “musical creation is not synonymous with theoretical research” (p. 24) and “a music concert is not an academic publication” (p. 40), I want to emphatize that I do consider the studio recordings presented in the Triaxis axes chapters as valuable material to link the experiential aspects of live remixing to the theoretical, operational and philosophical aspects of the Triaxis. That being adressed, they are not the focal point for my theoretical research or subject to much analysis in and of themselves.
It is more apt to describe my approach as having "situated myself theoretically while doing a critical or analytical reflection around the problems that are inherent in the artistic production. The artistic production has sometimes served as a pretext to reflection, or a laboratory in which constitutes as a reflection". (p. 133)
"Research-creation is not research on one side and creation on the other,” but, “rather, it is an interepistemology in which the two sides are interdependent” (p. 29).
I have with my Triaxis model attempted to invite critical analysis and start debates within the relatively narrow live remixing field. The methodology of Research-Creation inspired me to use artistic creations to challenge and evolve theory progressively.
Considering their emphasis on avoiding individual-centric focus; “research-creation is not self-
contemplation” (p. 45), I did not want to use this thesis for self-reflection via the studio recordings and the songs themselves. The project of hybridizing a process-philosophically oriented view on creativity and interaction with an experience, practice and
The benefits of valuing experiential inquiry, inter-disciplinary flexibility and innovation
Research-Creation fosters a direct integration of creative practice and scholarly inquiry, enabling artists to explore novel artistic territories while simultaneously documenting and analyzing their creative processes. This dual focus supports innovation and the discovery of new knowledge within the arts.
The method values the artist's hands-on experience as a primary source of knowledge, recognizing the creation of art as a legitimate form of research that can reveal insights unattainable through traditional academic methods alone.
Research-Creation is inherently interdisciplinary, encouraging the crossing of boundaries between artistic disciplines and academic fields to create a rich, multifaceted exploration of themes and ideas.
Distributed Creativity
The Triaxis model I synthesized (presented in the next subchapter) demonstrates distributed creativity both in and of itself and in terms of presenting the distributed creativity happening in live remixing. Each participant in the musical experience contributes to the evolution of the music, with creativity emerging not just from individual actions, but from the dynamic interplay between these actions, the audience's response, the environment, and the technology used. The creative process is seen as a network of interactions rather than residing in a single agent. The same is true for the dynamic interdependency of the axes in the Remixician's Triaxis.
Writing about the importance of the socio-cultural perspective in research on creativity, Vlad Glăveanu expresses a sentiment I believe captures the reason behind my curiosity in a more philosophical inquiry to explore creativity in the live remix environment:
In this framework the meaning of “cultural” does not imply the study of different cultures (as in cross-cultural investigations) but calls for a careful consideration of the worldview and cultural “toolkit” specific to different groups and communities even within the same society. It is a call for increased sensitivity towards the contexts of creation and also towards the systemic interdependence between self and others, between groups and societies, between societies and cultures. Only through these we may come to realize that creativity does not exist in the “self” or in the “other”, but “in between self and other”, that it is a highly interactional and intersubjective process. (Glăveanu, V., 2008)
In his book "Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the creative individual" Glăveanu describes how distributed creativity challenges individualistic, decontextualized research:
"[...] instead of an individual, an object or a place in which to 'locate' creativity, [the] aim here is to distribute it between people, objects and places." (Glăveanu, V., 2014)
Distributed Creativity in action - photo by Jørund Føreland Pedersen.
In 2020 I participated in the audio-visual art festival nodoCCS, where I live remixed two Venezuelan musicians performing in Caracas via live stream, and had my performance at Arteriet broadcasted back in real-time to the venue in Venezuela. It shows how far technological wormholes can interconnect musicians and artists all over the world.
As interactivity and networked co-creation becomes increasingly accessible through technology, artists need to boldly explore and develop new workflows. The groundbreaking art gallery Arteriet, now sadly closed, was an inspirational hotspot of innovative collaboration and inter-disciplinary courage in Kristiansand. Naysa Andrade, the gallery owner, showed me the power of distributed creativity through her curiosity in connecting artists from every imaginable field and daring to see what would happen through their synergy.
The initial attempt to create a prototype framework for live remixing, resulted in the Comprovisational Cycle, an interlinked feedback system of three aspects of spontaneous composition. It consisted on technological facilitation, our perceptual possibilities within this system and the hybrid term comprovisation - that referred to composing via the use of available techniques within the system and collective and individual improvising with the material. This evolved into the three axes of the Triaxis after extensive experimentation and discernement.
Evolution of the Remixician's Triaxis
The journey of the Triaxis model from its conceptual inception to its practical application has been a process where my artistic practice and academic research converged, informed, and transformed each other. The process has shown me the synergistic potential of artistic innovation and philosophical discourse.
Reflection & Refraction
I chose to add two subchapters in the Triaxis that serve to give some answers and raise some questions. They are divided in such a way in an attempt to focus more narrowly on critical analysis (reflection) and a more intuitive inquiry (refraction).
The "Reflection" subchapter reflects on the development of the Triaxis model, highlighting the dynamic interplay between theory and practice that has guided its continuous refinement and presenting indications of success with the research and its implications.
In the "Refraction" subchapter - the refractive aspect points to the various ways the Triaxis has changed which light I see live remixing in after the development of the model - how the Triaxis not only reflects live remixing conceptually, but how it filters, differentiates discernement, changes the angles of perception and gives rise to colorful discourse that raises new questions and encourages further observation.
Iterative Refinement through Practice
Key to the development of the Triaxis was its application in real-world settings, particularly in regards to the Cederberg Studios recordings. These sessions retrospectively served as mental laboratories for exploring the model's practical relevance. It has revealed the model's initial strengths and limitations, prompting a series of refinements.
Theoretical Re-examination
Each practical application of the Triaxis model necessitated a return to theoretical foundations, a reflective process that allowed for the incorporation of new insights and the reevaluation of existing concepts.
Alignment with philosophical aspects
The ongoing study of the works of Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze facilitated a deeper understanding of process philosophy, alternatives to traditional hierarchies and the main concepts conjunction/disjunction, the concrescence and the rhizome. This philosophical engagement ensured that the model remained not only a tool for analysis, but also a reflective and refractive instrument for understanding the nature of co-creative expression in such a dynamic and unpredictable musical environment as live remixing.
For Whitehead, experience is a description of relationships among moments of experience, rather than the intrinsic nature of an entity. I argue that this can be transferred to musical experience, where it is the relation among musical events, or the feeling inbetween, that is experiential, rather than the intrinsic nature of a physical substance or some materialist-reductionist view on musical experience through analyzing the brain's chemical reactions or electrical activity.
Deleuze, in collaboration with Félix Guattari, introduces the concept of the rhizome, an image of thought that advocates for a non-hierarchical and non-binary approach to connections and meanings. The rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system, which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of "things." Instead, the rhizome works with a map of multiplicities and unexpected connections.
"We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much." - A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F., 1987, p. 15)
Deleuze and Guattari challenged representational thinking and "arborescent" branches of representation. Rhizomes do not function according to representation. Nothing in a rhizome represents something else, it is rather the connections that matters.
This rejection of representational thinking is a significant liberation for the remixician when reinterpreting various musical instruments, compositions and material, that might be burdened by emotional, traditional and cultural expectancies of sonic expression and use - a sort of "ideal form". Instead, the remixician is not trying to create branches of representations or imitations, approximations or emulations of the original source. This also encourages a more open-minded, intuitive approach to what an input might sound like after being processed through a live remix rig - and avoids appropriation through its creative deconstruction and re-contextualized actualization.
Both philosophers emphasize the interconnectedness and the inter-relational and dynamic nature of reality. Deleuze’s rhizomes can be not merely compatible with Whitehead’s idea that reality consists of a web of interrelated processes, but help give an important alternative to the more bombastically defined hierarchies of relation one can encounter in more traditional musical analysis or causal hyperfocus on the sound engineering aspects of what causes qualia.
They also reject the classical notion of a deterministic universe composed of independent, discrete substances. Instead, they view the universe as a complex set of relations that are continually changing and evolving. Informed by my experience in live remixing, Deleuze and Whitehead's views seem to me to offer a philosophical foundation that is more capable of communicating the interdependencies and multiplicities of the live remix.
The challenges and insights encountered when analyzing live remixing through this lens led to a gradual redefinition of the axes, refining their descriptions to better capture the nuances of the musical dynamic and to ensure logical consistency in the model.
A significant re-examination led to developing a more discerning view of the Y-axis to distinguish between operational and experiential modes of processing. Initially the challenge was whether to let the Y axis account for the technical side of different audio signal processing or be solely focused on perception of the resulting sonic elements. Instead, hybridization gave rise to the two processing perspectives that I ended up utilizing in the other axes as well, giving a nuanced distinction and supportive clarification to why we place an element in the Triaxis where we do. This does potentially make the Triaxis more complex, but grants more flexibility when discussing how our processing choices are interdependently linked with our perception of those resulting sounds and vice versa.
The Triaxis answers - and the Triaxis questions
The evolution of the Triaxis model through the Research Creation process and Distributed Creativity exemplifies the fluidity of artistic and scholarly inquiry. It highlights how creative practice can both challenge and enrich theoretical models, leading to a richer, more nuanced understanding of complex phenomena. The Triaxis model, in its current form, can help bridging the gap between conceptual frameworks and the live experience of musical performance. It stands as a dynamic framework that can make us more capable of both communication and navigation in a live remixing environment.
In reflecting on the development of the Triaxis model, we see the embodiment of Research Creation's core principle: the mutual enrichment of research and creation, where each iterative cycle brings us closer to understanding the complexities of musical interaction and creativity.
In "A Thousand Plateaus," Deleuze and Guattari introduce the idea of the rhizome, a metaphor derived from botany that describes non-hierarchical, networked structures. Unlike trees with clear, linear, and hierarchical branches, rhizomes work through connection, heterogeneity, and multiplicity. Control, in a rhizomatic system, emerges from the interactions within the network rather than being imposed from a top-down structure.
Alfred North Whitehead's notion of concrescence, the process of diverse potentials converging into actualized realities, offers a philosophical foundation for understanding the emergent nature of music within the Triaxis model. The Origo, positioned at the center of the Triaxis, symbolizes the point of optimal creative potential where neither individual agency nor collective influence dominates, but instead coalesces into a dynamic, emergent process of musical and experiential novelty. This process of becoming, where new realities emerge from the confluence of various potentials and influences, is what I call the sonic concrescence.
Such an interpretation encourages a nuanced understanding of musical creation in the context of live remixing, as a process that transcends simple binary distinctions between the individual and the collective. Instead, it invites a holistic view of creativity as an emergent phenomenon arising from complex interactions within the musical ecosystem. The Origo, thus, can be seen as a metaphorical space where these interactions are most potent and where the continuous genesis of novelty is at its most vibrant.
This is how Whitehead describes the term in his "Process and Reality" (1929):
Here the notion of the need for the Collective (the many) which although conjunctively unifies groups of individuals, concrescences, it serves more as an extensively larger grouping where there are yet individuals outside of its boundaries. The Origo points to the critical ultimate boundary dissolution; the transcendent moment, where abstractions will only serve to bring us out of its actuality.
'Concrescence' is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the 'many' to its subordination in the constitution of the novel 'one'.
The most general term 'thing'— or, equivalently, 'entity'— means nothing else than to be one of the 'many' which find their niches in each instance of concrescence. Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel individual 'thing' in question. There are not 'the concrescence' and 'the! novel thing': when we analyse the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence. 'Actuality' means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is mere nonentity. In other words, abstraction from the notion of 'entry into the concrete' is a selfcontradictory notion, since it asks us to conceive a thing as not a thing.
An instance of concrescence is termed an 'actual entity'— or, equivalently, an 'actual occasion.' There is not one completed set of things which are actual occasions. For the fundamental inescapable fact is the creativity [322] in virtue of which there can be no 'many things' which are not subordinated in a concrete unity.
(Whitehead, 1929, p. 211)