The Result as Concept
A Satellite Essay
The album III is a result of this research. So is the concert. But they are not the same result, and neither is "the" result. They are two instantiations of a single conceptual outcome: the music that emerges when multiple musical identities, human and machinic, interact through improvisation.
This distinction matters. If the result were simply "the album," the research would be reducible to a product. You could hold it, stream it, evaluate it on its sonic qualities alone. The research would succeed or fail based on whether the album is any good. But that's not how artistic research works. The result is not only the artifact. The result is the knowledge embedded in and generated by the practice that produced the artifact.
So what is the conceptual result?
It is a kind of music. Not a genre, not a style, but a way of making. Music that arises from the collision of identities, filtered through a single personality, shaped by the constraints and affordances of the moment. This kind of music cannot be fully specified in advance. It emerges through improvisation, through the real-time negotiation between players, tools, and context. Cobussen (2017) describes improvisation as "an emergent, self-organizing, and adaptive structure" involving "perpetual negotiation between order and disorder, between structure and chaos" (p. 85). The result is not a fixed product but a living process that leaves traces.
It is a process that can be repeated without being replicated. You can do it again, but you won't get the same outcome. The album documents one occurrence. The concert documents another. A future performance would document yet another. Each is a valid instantiation of the same conceptual result, and none is definitive.
It is a demonstration that the research question can only be answered relationally, situationally, in the moment of performance. The question was: what kind of music arises from multiple musical identities? The answer cannot be given in words alone. It must be heard. And what is heard will differ each time, because the conditions differ each time.
Why Two Manifestations?
The album and the concert serve different functions.
The album, III, recorded with Juhani Silvola and Andreas Ulvo, is a studio document. It captures a particular configuration: two musicians with long-standing relationships, the Drift Engine as a catalyst (later turned off), careful recording and mixing, a considered sequence of tracks. It is repeatable in the sense that you can listen to it again. It is fixed, finished, available for close attention.
The concert at SAR Porto, with António Aguiar, is a live document. It captures a different configuration: two musicians who had never played together, the Drift Engine as an active participant throughout, an audience, a specific room, a specific moment. It is unrepeatable in the sense that the event is gone. What remains is documentation: recordings, video, memory.
Together, they demonstrate range. The same conceptual result can manifest in intimate studio collaboration and in public performance with a stranger. The underlying logic persists: multiple identities interacting, improvisation as epistemological mode, personality as the continuous thread. But the surface differs entirely.
This is why I resist calling the album "the result." It is a result. One manifestation. The concept is larger than any single artifact.
What Makes It a Contribution?
The contribution is not the album or the concert. The contribution is the demonstration that this way of working produces coherent, artistically viable music, and that the process generates knowledge that can be articulated and shared.
Specifically:
The music stands on its own. You can listen to III without reading this dissertation and find it musically interesting. It has a place in the current landscape of free improvisation. It bridges dialects: the free improv tradition, the more structured world of song-based music, the emerging practices of human-machine collaboration. This is not nothing. Making music that works is hard.
The process is documented and transferable. Someone else could adopt the methods (AI as disruptor, material constraints, custom tools, archival listening), follow a similar arc (startup, deconstruction, assemblage), and produce their own results. The outcomes would differ, but the approach could be shared.
The conceptual framing has value. The distinction between identity and personality, the treatment of improvisation as epistemological mode, the notion of the result as concept rather than product: these are articulations of things many musicians know implicitly but rarely name. Naming them makes them available for discussion, critique, and further development.
References
Bailey, D. (1993). Improvisation: Its nature and practice in music. Da Capo Press.
Borgdorff, H. (2012). The conflict of the faculties: Perspectives on artistic research and academia. Leiden University Press.
Cobussen, M. (2017). The field of musical improvisation. Leiden University Press.