Western popular culture includes many stories (with different formats and media, including musical works) concerning the man-machine relationships. Most of them with strong mythic resonances (from Greek and other mythologies nourishing Western culture) and more oriented towards the dystopian than utopian. The influence of these visions of mythical background has provoked an interesting debate in recent decades on the man-machine relationship, mainly affecting the “agency” (who controls the actions of the machine?) That debate moves (with much of its resonances) to the field of music, where the recent development of IAMUS intensifies the controversy. In that field, this debate is connected with other elements that have nurtured the "myth of music" (established within industrial society): especially, the author (genius) and the “authenticity". Understanding the man-machine relationships in the field of music, and ponder their future considering inventions like Iamus, requires the consideration of a number of ideas and items. Among others, the "authorship" as an idea established within industrial society (and its system of cultural industries). Also, that all musical composer has always used in his/her creative activity any technology (mechanical, electrical, digital). This digital technology, by the way, is one of the factors that influence the profound changes affecting the various phases of musical activity, that show many examples like these: remix, music selection lists, Shazam, failure of fixed contexts for music listening, breaking the IP model ... But the use of such technology is not yet affecting several major foundations that established the cultural industries to guaranty the success to their products -and to boost consumption. For example, that the relationship between listener and music product relies on the existence of recognizable musical patterns and in the right combination between repetition and innovation. This intervention observes the Iamus and its creations from the cultural analysis, which provides some of the key ideas with which to better understand the present and future of music.

1. Cyborgs in the music?
Computer, digital culture and
music practices
Miguel de Aguilera
Professor of Communications
University of Malaga

2. Why worry about
computer-composers?

3. Melomics as a cyborg
• Cause it is impersonating the human in the
field of creativity?
• But everyday life is full of smart machines that
help and complement us

4. Cyborgization of society
• Robots in Twitter / "Associated Press"
journalists replaced by robots that report on
finance and other news / drones for war,
digital war /…

5. Cyborgization of everyday life:
smart machines, wearable tech …
LABS
CONNECTED INTIMACY
Data Streamed Care
Emotional Mirror
Long Distance Togetherness
TAILORED ECOSYSTEM
Bespoke Biotech
Biometrically Attuned
Responsive Coaching
CO-EVOLVED POSSIBILITIES
Augmented Sensory Perception
Authenticated Self
Cloud Memory
On-Board Interface
3 MACRO TRENDS IN
WEARABLE TECH
The Future Of Wearable Tech @psfk / @int el / #FutureofWearables

6. Wearable technologies
Long distance togetherness 3D: customized prosthetics

7. Augmented capacities
Cloud Memory Augmented sensory perception

8. Realities and dreams
Hopes Nightmares

9. Cyborgization of the imaginaries
Blade Runner 2001: a space odissey

10. Euphoria and fears
Ubiquity and invisibility of smart machines in our daily lifes:
why we care with some of them?
Time of changes, loss of certainty
Globalization
Free market capitalism,
Permanent connectivity,
Influence of Technoscience,
Digitization
Everything changes so fast (and with many
worrying aspects) loss of certainties (Giddens,
Beck, Bauman)
Crisis of meaning and moral crisis (Castells, Berger
and Luckmann) we seek how to interpret and
evaluate what happens to us
We use the criteria we have available: they are mixed the expert interpretations, the
criteria established for the interpretation of the industrial society, even euphoria and
fears deeply rooted in our cultures (human as predator and victim)

11. Utopias and dystopias of
an uncertain future
In our cultures, myths and other narratives Prometheus- Fankenstein
Digitization and biotechnology: robot,
Robot: term of Czech origin: slave slave that receive orders
(even if an artificial one)
But: who controls the artificial hand?
F. Fukuyama, in the book "Posthuman
condition”, includes an essay:
"Agency or inevitability : will human beings
control their technological future?”
fear for a new Spartacus
they impersonate the gods giving life

12. Utopias and dystopias of
an uncertain future
Cyborg (1960's, cybernebetic-organism, from science) / cyberspace (1980's, from
science fiction, but taken to refer to the virtualization of culture and
communication)
Science Fiction, a popular genre which
dominates the dystopian approach
(an undesirable future society because of
"progress"): environmental disasters, nuclear
panic, totalitarian threats, fear of the "Other" -
Alien: man and beast and machine)
where major narrative
themes of our culture are
present

13. ¿Cyborgs in musical creativity?
Cyborg supplanting or instrument supplementing the human in musical creativity?
Another concern: it calls
into question some deeply held
beliefs about music that today in
general we share
wich set the industrial society
and today we have not yet
replaced
A basic axiom in the study of culture and communication is: each stage of history has
had its cultural forms, suitable instruments (technologies), their ways to get involved
(actors in roles), their ways of thinking about them
Also in music, there were different
stages
each type of music comes with
its musical mindset

14. Technology and music in social systems
The music in the societies of oral culture is received by direct hearing, spreads by
imitation, evolves by reinventing the music immemorial fits individual creation,
but most of the music has no author (collective works: Holy Bible, Greek mythology)
The emergence of
written technology
(notation, and its
industrial
reproducibility)
transmission
through the text,
independent of
the context of
reception
new cultural
regime: figure of
the composer, who
signs and aspires to
genius
economic
transmission of the
artwork (score,
recording):copyrigh
tpay to enjoy
Roles: Creation
(the genius)
Edition (fixing on a
support – text,
recording)
distribution
(interpreter)
enjoyment
(contexts and rituals
of reception)
Spatiotemporal context: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London / enshrines and idealizes a culture of
music and arts (establishing a canon and a "repertoire" classics)

15. The "myths of music" (N. Cook)
A recognizable way of thinking and rating culture: high, popular, mass
(despised by their technological and commercial mediations)
“Quality (classic)
music”
essentialist
perspective:
universal aesthetic
values , art by itself
(idealist tradition of
thought)
Authenticity (from blues to
rock: no pay royalties to black
authors: dishonest,
commercial purposes)
have to write the songs by
themselves, develop their own
style (genuine expression of
self: no commercial interests
values: innovation> tradition,
creation> reproduction,
personal expression>
Marketplace
Author: music as raw
material, author in
central position (genius,
inspired, abstracted from
requirements and
constraints)
creates and is entitled
to earn money

16. Changes in music
We live in a era of important changes, as it was the irruption of print: digitization
with sampling, sequencer (help in the composition), mixing programs and
arrangements, synthesizer (sounds without real referent), standard MIDI …
giving power to the individual (professional, amateur, Pro Am, producer -result of
collective intelligence-)
Production
Distribution (not attached to a support, ways access multiplying) and reception (broking
fixed contexts and rituals -deterritorialization and reterritorialization-)
(bankruptcy of the power of the sender, frequently occurs through collective
intelligence, is based on the connection to the "net" and on the disponiblity of almost
every product of human culture, numbers become and deterritorialized Indeed,
music is 0s and 1s  playing back is not reproducing copies, but always original
In the
nature of
the music
Multiple sources, constant hybridization (global-local)
New business models, new roles, new cultural practices (music as an accessory element,
linked to lifestyles) new schemes of interpretation of musical phenomena

17. Cibercultural context
Why we talk about cyberculture
It is one of the names of
culture in our society
(other: eg, liquid culture,
Bauman), which refers to
an imaginary (cyber) and
emphasizes the strong
digital dimension of our
cultural life (hardware,
software, content:
inseparable hybrid digital
electronic material and
symbolic environments)
The supernatural, so
clearly explained by Ortega
y Gasset (creation of an
artificial environment -
which overlaps the
natural, blending in with
him-, which includes
symbolic elements, where
we could achieve
wellness), is digital today
Separate technology,
culture and society is an
invention of the industrial
society (one of its ideal
bases)associated with
technological
determinism seeks to
made invisible, and that
seems inevitable by its
autonomous logic, certain
technological
development (hiding the
complex relationship of
forces that are behind its
development)

18. Factors, conditions, agents
That digital supernatural is the result of a context (requirements of contemporary
capitalism, World War II and Cold War, ...), in which the influence of certain ideas are
included:
countercultural utopias (silicon + LSD in
California) movement "computers for
the people" (in the hands of people
without technical guardianships or
powers) and otherprinciples:
interconnection (allow interpersonal
communication), community building
(social bond), which is developed as a
smart group
activity of certain subcultural
movements (punk, etc.) and avant-garde
artappropriate new
techniques, subvert the order
proposed
In sum, the main social agent that brings out cyberculture
(here and there): educated urban youth

19. Arts, enrolled in cyberculture
Arts for art's sake is a thing of the past. Art does not only refer to itself, but reflects
the outside world and often acts as a catalyst for certain tendencies in society. That
also goes for the merging of man and technology. Some artists reflect(ed)
contemporary technology and use(d) it as material for considerations on the role of
technology in society. What matters is finding new points of reference, that can define
the nature of human existence.
• Arts for art's sake is a thing of the past. Art does not only refer to
itself, but reflects the outside world and often acts as a catalyst for
certain tendencies in society. That also goes for the merging of man
and technology. Some artists reflect(ed) contemporary technology
and use(d) it as material for considerations on the role of
technology in society. What matters is finding new points of
reference, that can define the nature of human existence.
John
Cage
• An artistic orientation with many expressions: comics (Möbius),
videoinstalaciones (Nam Jun Paik), ars infographica, videojuegos/
Blade Runner, Total recall, The Matrix, …
• In the music: John CageStockhausen(Velvet Undergroud, Pink
Floyd)punkmusic recording studioDJsMusic
Detroit Techno,
Chicago House, New York Garage, …
Stockhousen
Velvet
Undergro
und (Pink
Floyd
Punk
Music
recording
studio
Djs
Detroit
Techno
Chicago
house

20. Cyborgization of Music
From Kraftwerk To Janelle Monae

21. Pierre Lévy (1997): Cyberculture
“The genres of the cyberculture are highly diverse:
automatic compositions of scores or texts, techno
musics from a recursive sampling work and
arrangements from existing music, artificial life
systems or autonomous robots, virtual worlds, web
pages that point to the aesthetic or cultural
intervention, hypermedia, events federated
through the network by involving participants via
digital devices, various hybridizations of the "real"
and the "virtual”, interactive installations, etc.”

22. Prophecies? Foresight and insight
“All traits I just listed: active participation of the
performers, collective creation, work-event,
work-process, interconnection and mixing
limits, work emerging -as a visual Aphrodite-from
an ocean of digital signs, all these features
converge to the decline (but not to the pure and
simple disappearance) of the two figures so far
have ensured the integrity, substantiality and
possible totalization of works: author and
recording.”

23. Musical futurology
Radical changes: need for new criteria to understand
Very fast changes versus the need to provide medium-term scenarios: prospective
of technology and of cultural practices
Several new professional activities: traits predicting the traist of future, cool hunting,
emphasis on the marketing
stresses, in the
technological field:
streaming and
mobility (+ the
immersive: virtual
reality)
Tips for music
professionals
(includes considering
an increasing global
competition and with
the amateurs -Pro
Am, produser-; but
not with cyborgs)
New business
models
The most scarce
and precious
commodity: the
user's attention
get engaged (and
then, viralize)
Prospectives

25. Computer composing Challenge
Do not forget that the computer is an assistant tool of the composer, who wants to
generate music for certain purposes
The technology is not closed, is not
determined alone, the future is built
there are different social actors struggling to
guide the world (with utopian or dystopian
visions)
Uses to increase freedom or welfare?
open source, empowerment and other (but attention to the exploitation of this:
Double appropriations –remix-, advertising and viralizations, economy of emotions –
facebook-)

26. Cyborgs composing
Composing IAMUS, Melomics
or successors the Ode to Joy,
or the Heroic, by themselves?
It lacks the genius -in
profound ways that it rests-and
the condition of "us"
Pinching in the heart to see your
children sleep /satisfaction for
waking love or be loved / melancholy
that comes and goes (and Mahler
helps underscore) / pleasure of a
pint at the seaside / mortality
awareness
We are people made in the interaction with other
Ortega y Gasset: dintorno
and contour (I am myself
and my circumstances)
Will they replicate Artificial Intelligence and
Robotics (or genetic engineering) each
element of the human being?and for
what? (replicant in Blade Runner: with
feelings, personality made in interaction,
awareness of mortality)

27. Disturbing prospective?
It will affect easier to popular music (mass culture) tweak elements of previous
codes, combined in new ways
Cyborg
composer
Generating own
styles?
Style requires deep
insertion in the
context
to be linked to
lifestyles (that often
includes rituals)
Even if:
Big data:
behavioral traits
processed for
defining lifestyles
Trend uptake
mechanisms (cool
hunting, etc.) and
promoting lifestyles
Data provided by
neuromarketing and
other neuroscience