In my engagement to develop a historically informed performance practice in electronic music I find that the role of the self comes to the forefront in new and interesting ways. Previous hidden features of these historic instruments may be discerned and recontextualized through an artistic practice in which the self’s relation to the self is dissected. Playing the instrument is the method to understand them. The giving up of the self in artistic practice is not an act of submission to others, but a conscious openness to dialogue with them, as well as with other instruments and non-humans. The instrument that I will be discussing here is a modular synthesizer and audio mixer designed in Sweden in the early the 1970’s called Dataton 3000 (see Fig. 1) This modular synthesizer and audio mixer was designed by Björn Sandlund in an attempt to make a versatile instrument for electronic music and pedagogical uses (Sandlund 2019). In a slow and meticulous process of untangling the ways in which these instruments can be approached (Holzer, Shi, and Holzapfel 2021; Holzer, Frisk, and Holzapfel 2025, 2021) a certain proficiency with the interface was developed. In other words, rather than imposing a pre-conceived compositional or improvisatory framework onto the instruments, I sought to uncover possibilities through interaction with their broader context. Therefore, to grasp the specific qualities and nuances of the Dataton 3000 modules, it is necessary to consider a broad array of parameters. Through the act of playing, the other may be conceived as the wider contextual framework of these instruments, parts of which emerge in the course of practice. Should this analysis not be successful, there is a risk that the instrument’s proper qualities may be misunderstood, or that one ends up recreating what has already been done with it, or both. It is, however, the relations between these attributes that I am interested in, not my dominance of one, or one parameter’s dominance over me.

In a wider scope of contemporary technologies, the rate at which their development in general progresses can render technological and software objects sometimes less than a decade old incompatible with current systems, which makes working with these modules even more interesting. What are the properties, or uses, of the Dataton that have been concealed by the rapid development of contemporary music technology? They went out of production and disappeared from mainstream music technology market. An experimental hypothesis is that by learning from these early instruments, learning about the particularities of the interface will alter the disposition of my self in relation to the instruments. This could potentially also illuminate new dimensions of the complex nature of improvisation in electronic music in general.

In an artistic practice that departs from use of obsolete instruments, the interrelations between the various subjects and objects involved in the performance can become complicated, but they may also disclose the challenges involved in a fruitful manner. The most prominent is the aspect of technology itself. Though many examples of inventive music technology designs are incorporated into mainstream products, others are simply forgotten and abandoned despite their sometimes explicit contribution to the development. The race for inventing new and even more laborious electronic instruments and interfaces, fueled by inventiveness, need and by market economy and capitalism, makes artistic practices involving these kinds of instruments fragile and vulnerable to changes that render (parts of) the instruments unusable. Software upgrades, abandoned hardware circuits, forgotten system-specific knowledge, or simply the fact that new upgrades are so much more compelling in their usability and sonic or musical qualities may render the old instruments obsolete. Traditional acoustic instruments are generally not upgraded in this fashion, so this is a particular trait of electronic instruments.

That commercial aspects have a great impact in this field is also validated by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco when they conclude that “from a flexible variety of possible control configurations, the synthesizer eventually stabilised into a keyboard instrument” (1998, 28). In other words, over time the highly experimental field of design of electronic musical instruments appears to be narrowed, and standardization in collaboration with market forces exclude those items that are not successful enough, or simply incompatible with current production paradigms. This brings us back to the discussion relating to the impact of capitalism on the field. Even instruments used within experimental artistic practices that aim to resist capitalist market forces are ultimately absorbed into the prevailing norms of efficiency, production, and design standardization. Repudiated and eventually incompatible with supporting systems such developed interfaces may eventually be rendered useless by the market. It is true that no Western instruments, electronic or acoustic, are independent from the commodifying forces of the market economy, but the way that the development of electronic instruments is aligned with the advancements of technology in society in general makes them particularly sensitive to this process. A certain merging of the fields is also occurring here where tools of communication such as the mobile phone are used and explored also for artistic performances (Wang 2014; Madhavan and Snyder 2016).

There are both differences and similarities between the study of traditional methods for musical interpretation rooted in Western musical history and practices, and the excavation of the technological and cultural significance of a particular electronic musical instrument of the past. Since at least the romantic era the definition of the artistic work has been constructed from the vantage point of the composer in a strictly hierarchical structure with the self of the originator at the centre. This is well described by the French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes in his famous essay The death of the Author (Barthes 1968), where the basic critique is that detailed biographical, geographical and historical knowledge about the composer, rather than the text itself, is at the core of traditional interpretations of a work. Hence, following this line of thought, a true understanding of the work has to pass through the understanding of the auteur and their many attributes. This structural organization of the musical work makes it susceptible to commodification, but also, or perhaps even more so, turns the author into a commercial object whose presence in social media defines both of their values. My distancing, or giving up, of myself is part of my attempt to detach myself from this perspective and instead to establish an artistic practice where the self is in constant motion, where there is no center or origin, only relations. The work concept in this case will also be in constant motion, rendering a structural analysis rather meaningless through the amalgamation of the self with the process.

As already mentioned the instruments in this study through which I have explored the processes of the self are the Dataton System 3000. Despite its utopian vision these modules were not widely used, neither as musical instruments, nor were they fully explored for as pedagogical tools. It thus exemplifies the kind of harsh expulsion that the market carries out on unwanted and commercially useless objects. My primary interest here, however, is not the objects in themselves, nor is my engagement grounded in a fetishism for pre-digital equipment. My fascination for these instruments arises from an effort to contextualize them within a wider framework and apply that understanding to my musical practice and creative exploration. This includes, but is not limited to their historical origins. From a point of interpretation of the instruments one could perhaps paraphrase Jacques Derrida’s statement that il n’y a pas de hors-texte (Derrida 2016). A full understanding of the instrument can only be attained through a broad understanding of what the context is. A signal generator in a Dataton 3000 module is unlike any other signal generator; it is a signal generator that pertains to the greater context of this particular instrument.

The way the user approaches the instrument is an important part of the construction of the understanding of the object in a way that is also related to how Barthes privileges the interpreter rather than the author. While this line of thinking is useful in performance, there is still a risk of creating hierarchies in the relations between the various actors if the instruments and the interpretation of them are put at the centre in this way. Neither is it my interest to design an artistically driven project where the end goal is a work, which undoubtedly also would construct a hierarchy around the artifact.

Instead I am interested in the interactions that are made possible by engaging in an artistically driven play with the objects I am playing with. While I make use of the knowledge produced in the process of interpretation discussed above, during a performance I become part of the context and this changes the conditions for the interactions within the system. I engage in a free play, unbound by purpose or meaning, though it may eventually unfold further. The result may be one or several works, but they are not the goal, they are subordinate to the process. In this free play I get involved with certain questions in a way that would otherwise not have been possible, and improvisation is part of the method that allows me to do this.

To summarize, in the field of music one may imagine two models of analysis emerging from this discussion. The traditional historical and author-centered approach, and a historically informed exploration of electronic music heritage. The first model originates in the work, and the second model attempts to understand a performative context that supports a network of relations, including an originator, but does not necessarily privileging them. This approach is related to the HIP movement for authentic classical music performance, but our work in the project Historically informed design of sound synthesis, which frames this project, is not concerned as much with authenticity as it is with an exploration of the wider practice using obsolete instruments. Within the HIP movement there is a wish to recreate the performance of a piece of music as it sounded at its time of creation. Our focus is not on revival, but on understanding a historical context and developing it. The key distinction between these analytical models lies in their perspective: the first adopts an external viewpoint, treating the musical work as an objective entity often centered on the author, while the second embraces a performative approach, fostering a network of relationships that includes the originator but does not grant them inherent privilege. The latter, I would argue, is not normative on the level of practice as it does not prescribe how one should do something, but rather proposes how one may understand something one already does. The practice analyzed here is based on improvisation, and improvisation is a method or a form that freedom can take. This freedom enables the development of a different understanding of the self, one that is rooted in the practice’s many interrelations. The added value is that this model presents an expanded ethical dimension that is likewise relived through the freedom in artistic practice. This will be further discussed in the next section.