Experimental sense-making, musicking and no control: Performing black box music instruments

In musical improvisation with custom-built, unfamiliar 'black box' instruments, performers and audiences face ambiguous agency, where the instruments function alternately as extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Players shift from reactive analysis to proactive improvisation, and the unpredictability destabilises traditional control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making. The project shows how complexity and unpredictability foreground questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience, highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract The text explores ‘Black Box Music,’ an artistic research experiment investigating human–technology relations in musical improvisation. The authors describe performances in which each musician plays an unfamiliar, complex, custom-built instrument designed by another team member. These ‘black box’ devices – ranging from AI-based systems to assemblages of analogue devices – cannot be fully understood or controlled, thus foregrounding questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, phenomenology, and philosophies of technology, the authors show how performers, instruments, and audience form a dynamic network of actants whose roles and intentions remain ambiguous. Players initially struggle to ‘read’ the instruments’ behaviour, shifting from reactive analysis toward proactive improvisation. This process blurs embodiment and alterity: the instruments alternately function as transparent extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Such ambiguity invites anthropomorphisation and even ritualised interaction, echoing historical entanglements of music, magic, and spirituality. Audience members, too, encounter indeterminate agency and must negotiate aesthetic meaning without clear attribution of sound to human or machine. The project demonstrates how complexity and unpredictability destabilise traditional notions of control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making and highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.