Trust
A Satellite Essay
Trust is not a word that appears often in discussions of improvisation, but it should. Improvisation depends on trust in ways that composed music does not. When you improvise, you don't know what will happen. You can't know. The outcome emerges from interaction, and interaction requires that each participant takes risks the others will have to accommodate.
This is obvious when you think about it, but rarely stated. We talk about listening, about responsiveness, about being "in the moment." These are all aspects of trust. To listen is to trust that what you hear matters. To respond is to trust that your response will be heard. To be in the moment is to trust that the moment will yield something worth being in.
Trust Between Musicians
When I play with musicians I know well, like Juhani Silvola or Andreas Ulvo, trust is already established. We have history. We've played together many times, failed together, succeeded together, learned each other's tendencies and tolerances. I know what Juhani will likely do in certain situations. He knows what I will likely do. This knowledge creates a container in which risk-taking is safer. We can push further because we trust the other will follow, or respond, or at least not abandon the music.
This trust is built over time. It cannot be shortcut. You earn it by showing up, by playing, by demonstrating that you can be relied upon. It accumulates through shared experience and is damaged by betrayal (musical or otherwise). It is, in a sense, the social foundation of musical identity: who you are as a musician is partly constituted by who trusts you and whom you trust. Cobussen (2017) captures this precisely: "especially improvised music hinges on the ability of all participating musicians to synchronize their ideas and actions and to maintain a keen awareness of, sensitivity to, and connection with the evolving group dynamics and experiences" (p. 96). This synchronization is trust made audible.
When I play with musicians I don't know, like António Aguiar at the Porto concert, trust has to be established in the moment. There is no history to draw on. We had one rehearsal, plagued by technical difficulties. We knew almost nothing about each other's playing. What we had was a shared commitment to the performance and a willingness to take the risk.
This kind of instant trust is fragile and exhilarating. It requires a leap of faith: I will play something, and I will trust that you will respond in a way that makes musical sense, even though I have no evidence that you will. You will do the same. The music that emerges is a record of that mutual risk-taking.
Trust in the Listener
There is another dimension of trust that gets less attention: trust in the listener. When I make music, I am trusting that someone will hear it. Not just physically hear it, but attend to it, engage with it, complete it with their own attention and interpretation.
This is especially relevant for the album III, which is designed to be listened to with headphones, with your finger held on the screen, forced to stay present, forced to make a choice about whether to continue or stop. The design imposes a demand: you must actively choose to listen. And that demand is an expression of trust. I trust that the music is worth your sustained attention. I trust that you will give it.
Archival listening, as I practice it, also involves trust in the listener. When I remove material, when I strip away context, when I leave gaps and absences, I am trusting that the listener will complete the work. I am not providing everything. I am providing enough, and trusting that enough is enough.
Trust in the Machine
What does it mean to trust a machine? The Drift Engine doesn't have intentions or feelings. It doesn't know whether I trust it. It can't betray my trust in any meaningful sense, because it can't choose to behave otherwise than its programming dictates.
And yet, playing with Drift requires something that feels like trust. I have to trust that its responses will be musically useful, or at least musically navigable. I have to trust that my own design decisions were good enough to create a system worth interacting with. I have to trust that the emergent behavior, the stuff I didn't explicitly program, will be interesting rather than merely chaotic.
This is trust in a system, not trust in an agent. It's closer to trusting a musical instrument than trusting a musician. When I sit down at a piano, I trust that the keys will produce the sounds I expect. When I play with Drift, I trust that the system will produce responses I can work with, even if I can't predict exactly what they'll be.
But there's a difference. A piano is predictable; Drift is not. A piano doesn't respond to what I play; Drift does. The trust required for Drift is somewhere between instrument-trust and musician-trust. It's trust in a responsive system whose responses are shaped by rules I designed but cannot fully control.
Trust in the Process
Finally, there is trust in the process itself. Artistic research, especially practice-based research, requires trusting that the work will yield knowledge, even when you can't see where it's going. The deconstruction phase of this research was an exercise in process-trust. I was taking things apart without knowing whether I could put them back together. I was questioning everything without knowing whether answers would come.
This kind of trust is uncomfortable. It feels like falling. You have to believe that the practice itself will catch you, that doing the work will generate the insights, that the mess will eventually resolve into something communicable. There are no guarantees. You do the work and trust that it matters.
Why Trust Matters
Trust is the invisible infrastructure of improvisation. Without it, nothing works. Musicians who don't trust each other play defensively, protecting themselves rather than risking together. Listeners who don't trust the artist disengage. Artists who don't trust the process get stuck.
This research has been, among other things, an exercise in trust. Trust in collaborators, known and unknown. Trust in machines, designed and unpredictable. Trust in listeners, present and future. Trust in the process, messy and uncertain. The music that emerges is not just the sound of identities interacting. It is the sound of trust being enacted, tested, and (hopefully) rewarded.
Related Text
For an extended treatment of trust in working with strangers, distance as a creative strategy, and "best effort" as evaluation criterion, see the companion essay "Trust in distance, distance in trust", which documents the creation of Itzama and its installation piece.
References
Bailey, D. (1993). Improvisation: Its nature and practice in music. Da Capo Press.
Cobussen, M. (2017). The field of musical improvisation. Leiden University Press.