Final Reflections
The discussion concerning how scientific technology, such as that which is found in an advanced contemporary music studio, may require a mode of reflection that differs from the intuition of artistic sensibility and may be especially relevant in the contemporary landscape of advanced automated systems. Part of the efficiency of already simple AI systems lies in the fact that the layers of operation between input and output are usually disguised. There is no way of engaging intuitively with AI in the way that is proposed in this paper, since only part of the entire system can be known: if the output is erroneous, some parameters may be tweaked in the input, but the system as a whole is extremely enigmatic for the user. The compositional system described earlier relies on access to all of the operations between input and output and on the notion that these are integral parts of the whole, without which much of the process will be, at best, difficult to navigate.
Returning to the main question concerning how sonic gestures can be understood as carriers of meaning, a preliminary reflection is that when these gestures are analyzed as part of the system that contributed to generating them rather than in isolation, they are less amorphous and enigmatic, as Barry Truax puts it (Truax 2002: 22). Their meaning as part of a larger whole gives rise to a different experience.
I believe that the study presented here gives some relevance to the fact that there is an inside perspective from which knowledge and information may be gathered in artistic research and that it may be navigated with the method of intuition. As Bergson makes clear, and as I have pointed out, this knowledge is different in nature from what may be gathered from the outside perspective. Hence, I believe that Bergson's method of intuition can lead to an understanding of sound within the processes of playing or composing, as well as through the various elements upon which the sound is dependent (such as the source, the kind of processing, the system for playback, the medium, etc.). The epistemological nature of artistic practice in music, however, is complex, and the proposed method is not enough in and of itself. Nevertheless, intuition, as described here, may provide us with a method with which the artistic researcher may observe their practice and extract relevant data. This is a process that is productively informed by the method of intuition, by means of which important information may be gathered through intuitive analysis. It is the recursive interaction between this analysis and the decision-making in an art practice, that, I argue, allows for intuition as a method which is useful for understanding what artistic knowledge in music may be. The question of how to present this information in ways that contribute to the general development of knowledge in the field is, as I pointed out earlier, a larger question beyond the scope of this paper.
Sound, the way I have discussed it here, is not a thing, not an object, that we listen to. It is a system of interrelated threads, the meaning of which is much larger than the actual sound itself. To engage artistically with sound is to attempt to understand the trajectories of this system, and each sound heard in this process may be intuited through the internal structure of this system. Since artistic processes are to a high degree already governed by a mode of intuition (in the traditional sense of the word) and sensibility, the method proposed by Bergson can be both interesting and useful, possibly allowing for a different theoretical approach. It helps me to understand the material I am working with as well as the in-time process that I engage with when making decisions about the different steps in the artistic process. The specific knowledge in this practice lies partly in the ways these decisions are being made and not merely in what material is being discovered. To point out that listening to music is an experience that contributes to one’s spatial understanding may be unnecessary, but due to the fact that the fields of technology and artistic practice are merging in the studio, putting the focus back on the attempt to understand it from its inner perspective has relevance.