Interweaving Presence: Improvisation, Neural Audio and the Ethics of Authorship
This presentation proposes music improvisation as a method of interweaving: a way of making relations audible between bodies, histories, futures, individual voice and collective listening. From this perspective, improvisation becomes a rigorous test-bed for AI creativity claims precisely because it is situated, contingent, and socially negotiated in real time.
The discussion is grounded in my own neural-audio instrument: a RAVE model trained exclusively on my saxophone playing. As a deliberately self-sourced system, it reframes “AI collaboration” away from technical novelty and towards questions of ethical relation: what kinds of presence are invited, amplified, or silenced when neural audio enters live practice, and what forms of responsibility follow from that invitation?
Three theoretical threads guide my argument:
Marcel Mauss’s account of the gift reframes sound-making as exchange: improvisation circulates gestures, techniques, and styles as gifts that generate obligations of credit, acknowledgement, and return.
Lucy Suchman’s situated action keeps agency anchored in the live moment and its infrastructures: authorship is not a label attached after the fact, but negotiated through rehearsal, design, labour, and the politics of listening.
Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action helps articulate how authorship and responsibility are produced in the encounter itself, through the specific entanglement of performer, AI model, acoustics, and audience.
Prof Franziska Schroeder
Franziska Schroeder is a Professor of Music and Cultures at Queen’s University Belfast, a saxophonist and improviser, working at the intersections of music improvisation, AI, embodied performance, and accessible digital technologies. Her research explores relational authorship, ethics, and the politics of listening in contemporary music practices, including work on neural audio and performer-led frameworks for provenance and accountability. Amongst many others, she has published a Cambridge Scholars book “Soundweaving: Writings on Improvisation, which developed improvisation as an interdisciplinary practice of connection and process. She performs internationally and develops practice-research projects that foreground inclusive, participatory, and critically situated methods.
Queen's University Belfast