Music in the making: identities and personality at play

Prelude

Music in itself has rarely been enough for me. Over the years I have usually tried to connect something more: a clear meaning, an external purpose, another artwork to emphasize, or text. During this process, however, it turned out that the more self-contained the music, the more I trusted it. The less I felt it needed further additions, the closer it came to be what I was looking for.

This might seem contradictory, but it isn't. I mention these statements not because I need to understand what music is, but because early on I realized I needed a way to qualitatively assess my own musical output. I needed a tool to help distinguish what "good" would mean (it is the universally label applied before reaching "finished", after all) , both for myself and in terms that could work for others. It's not easy finding such a tool, but while trying to figure it out I made a lot of different kinds of musical products that has all helped identifying and hone this (personal) tool.

To begin with, the music was 1) made and then 2) I spent a lot of time making attachments for it—Itzama, for example, had many artifacts connected to it. Moving through the project, reflecting upon reflections, remaking and reusing, the want to make these persisted but became less connected to the musical idea that was appearing. The musical result became conceptually stronger, more self-contained, thus needing less, and in the end, no additions at all.

So: saying "music is not enough" and then stating "the more self-contained, the more I trusted it" is not a contradiction—it is a description of a qualitative tool that I discovered along the way, articulated now, in this writing.

And applied to this project, the tool tells me when something is finished. This is obviously a contextual observation, because "what I am looking for" is largely shaped by the fact that this is a PhD project, and not primarily about making one, or several, album(s). But the logic holds: what closes a project, for me at least, is the sense of ending up with a product that no longer needs additions. The moment the product clicks into "finished", I have found "it", and in this case, "it" would be the answer to my initial PhD question: what kind of music arises from multiple musical identities. I have revisited this formulation many times, considering alternatives like "In what way are multiple musical identities affecting the musical result?" but I keep returning to the original phrasing because it foregrounds emergence—what arises—rather than causation.

The album "III" is the answer to that question, so is the concert performance. Interestingly, since music as a way of expression is momentary and fluid, and exists only through listener memory the moment the instruments are no longer actively engaged, the result is not confined to be neither that one album, nor the one concert. The final product is always conceptual—by which I mean that the music exists as a transferable idea, an emotional and aesthetic statement that persists beyond any single instantiation. The album is one occurrence, the concert another, but what they share is a demonstrated possibility: this is what happens when these identities meet under these conditions. The conceptual result is not a formula but a shown example, and it is in many ways a musical description, transferred to you through sound, of the realizations I've uncovered during the past three years.

It is also connected to how those realizations have influenced and allowed me to find the path that I now see I was on. I find it very interesting, when writing about it now, that what has been going on could indeed be described as a "theoretical machine," a drift engine if you will, where the best way to approach new territory is to roll with anything, trusting that my background is strong enough to support any idea, and, through this support be able to identify the end point, i.e. the answer. The interesting observation here is that I coined the term "theoretical machine" for my first presentation of this project at the ARF in Oslo, spring 2023, and later moved on to make the Drift Engine, without planning on connecting any of those as directly to this text as they seem to be now.

Going back to conceptuality, this is how it has to be, because I, and many others (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008; Juslin, 2019) see music as something always experienced through emotion, memory, and association. In fact, I now see music as a tool to transfer emotional content from one abstract mind to another. The ability to articulate this, like I do now, is, on a personal level, perhaps one of the key gains and strengths I'll take with me from this project. Knowing it seems to allow me to appreciate the fluid quality of music more than it did before, and it is a knowledge that will play a large part in shaping my future ways of musical creation.

Through the course of the PhD I have met many people from the field of artistic research, and among them, many musicians, none of whom occupy the same musical space as I do. By this I mean the space of the practice-based musician who makes music intended to stand on its own—commercially viable, aesthetically complete, requiring no academic framing to justify its existence—while simultaneously conducting research through that practice. I don't have an interest in entering the debate about absolute versus programmatic music, or what music is, but I can say that this space is largely under-represented in the research community, and I'm honestly not sure if what I present as the final artistic result will be received as such in many of those environments.

The album I made at the end of this process, entitled "III", is something I regard as a fine and artistically solid body of work because it works on its own, and it doesn't need me to explain it. For others, that might be too simple or not "art" enough, but for me, it is a marker of finality and these three years of research has been about that also, about how I now know that this is the end result, and the answer to a question.

The question

What kind of music arises from multiple musical identities?

It came from practice, not theory. For many years, and truthfully, for all of my professional life, my work has been divided across three distinct roles: drummer, singer-songwriter, and a general term "studio producer". Nowadays, I'm a bit unsure that I can even use these terms to explain what I have done over the years. With the exception of "drummer" I have never felt like a singer-songwriter and still mostly use the term when applying for funding, a situation in which we are all reduced to a set of labels found in a drop-down menu, and further, studio producer... what does that mean now, and how do you become one? The answer here depends on the level and the threshold of course, and leads towards figuring out when are you something at all?

Many faff about at home with bought sample packs, and many invest heavily in studio hardware. None of these methods guarantee anything in terms of result, so, logically, what you are is what you feel, and what you feel depends on what you do. This, then, gives you an identity, I would say, and the identity can change, and will change, often, out of necessity, of opportunity, of confidence, and so on. But these musical identities are not the whole picture. Behind them are skills, education, interests—the web designer, the graphic designer, the photographer, the Research Catalogue expert, the maker who exhibited at Dutch Design Week, the small-scale real estate administrator who manages ten tenant contracts across Oslo. These are not separate from the musical identities; they feed into them, enable them, and sometimes compete with them for attention. The versatility is not chaos; it is the texture of a practice that has never fit neatly into single categories.

Underlying all of this is the person, that is to say the personality, which, as I see it, is the whole and the governing body that provides a space in which all of these identities, outside of only musical too, of course, are allowed to exist. Personality research, particularly the five-factor model developed by McCrae and Costa (2008), demonstrates that while surface behaviors and preferences shift across contexts, core traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—remain relatively stable across the lifespan. What I call personality here aligns with this: the continuous thread that makes someone recognizably themselves despite surface variation. I find it to be a very rewarding way to see it, I must say, because it means you can do anything, change and adapt and learn and evolve, without ever losing track of where it comes from or giving up on something in favor of something else.

This view resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) concept of multiplicity, where identity is not a fixed essence but a dynamic assemblage constantly in flux. It also connects to Butler's (1990) performative theory of identity, where identity is constituted through repeated actions rather than being something we simply possess. But mostly it's an observation I have made, that I haven't understood fully before.

A personality, defined like this, is also what allows these identities to exist in parallel, occasionally overlapping, but never fully integrated. Consider: when I sit behind a drum kit in a jazz trio, I am attending to rhythm, to interaction, to the specific demands of supporting other musicians. When I program a synthesizer for a production, I am attending to texture, to arrangement, to the longer arc of a piece. These orientations require different kinds of attention, different vocabularies, different criteria for success. They draw on different parts of my accumulated knowledge. They are not interchangeable, but they are both mine—expressions of a single personality through different modes of musical being.

In the project proposal for this PhD the idea was to see what would happen if I stopped keeping them separate. What music would emerge if I forced them into collision? It quickly turned out that if you allow for anything, then everything will happen, and everything everywhere at once is, well, messy and impossible to understand. Although being a little interesting, it is hardly a discovery, but seeing it in the very early stages told me how confinement will sharpen an output and also how allowing knowledge from one to seep into the confinements of another will help expand, without erasing. It was not about removing all the barriers, but rather, seeing how structure and classification is what makes something something, while simultaneously discovering the palimpsest theory before I thought of it as such. This came later, when I saw a presentation by Helene Førde at the Graduate Research School summer 2024 and realized that this is exactly how it works for me: overwriting, redoing, sharpening and expanding, never erasing and never settling.

From there, the question evolved, and so did the project and the methods. Early on, I tried replacing "identities" with "facets," hoping to avoid the weight the word identity carries in broader discourse. But I returned to it, because the implications matter. A facet is a surface; an identity is something you enact. Musical identity, as I came to understand it, is not a fixed attribute, not a genre affiliation or instrumental specialization, but something that emerges through playing, through interaction, through the ongoing negotiation between self and context.

This navigation is how artists navigate a strangely flux space where we also face the obligation to convince an audience that the product of ours, be it career, album, artwork or other, has worth, and partly to create the product itself. This, then, opens up yet another area of identity exploration: is the identity of the artist-in-public the same as the artist-alone? The answer will vary, of course, but it seems to me that nowadays, placing the seemingly raw and unfiltered "self" on display works well for many. I don't like it personally; in a finished product I look for something that is solid enough to become a platform from which I can understand and develop intellectually, and this solidity comes from two sides: 1) I have to trust the creator to have the capability to know that the product is ready to be shown, and 2) the product should be as unbound from this fact as possible. I think this explains why sometimes the line "I woke up this morning, ... etc" works well, while other times the exact same line does not work at all.

Going back to conviction, what I mean is that what often happens in a career is that you present something, then reiterate on that, then present another piece, then reiterate again, going back and forth between modes of creation and presentation, thereby building and crafting a career as a whole. I'm personally not very good at the presentation part, but I excel at the creation.

This understanding of personality and identity that I have now matches with the work of MacDonald, Hargreaves, and Miell (2017), editors of the leading handbook on musical identity research, who describe musical identity as socially and culturally situated, co-constructed through interaction rather than inherited or assigned. I think that makes a lot of sense, and again, this does not have to be consciously known to be able to build a career, but it sure helps if you already have one and find yourself to be stuck.

Closing this section, the question was never about mixing genres or combining instruments, but rather, it is about what happens when different ways of being a musician, different identities in the creative sense, meet within a single practice, a single body, a single personality.

Identities and personality

The title of this dissertation makes a distinction: identities and personality. This is deliberate, and central to everything that follows.

The way I use the term "identities" is, in the work I present, tied to how it clarifies the aspects important to the research. My research is musical, so whenever I address identity, music is embedded within it. This is a way of being contextually aware, and after reading this text, I assume the receiver will have that same contextual awareness and use it actively when exploring the body of my work. But the musical identities do not exist in isolation from the others. I am also, and have long been, a Research Catalogue expert—I hesitate to use the term "expert" I must admit, but in RC terms, I am. Over the past 10 years I have provided tutoring, support and guidance on this topic, to administrators and authors, in universities across Norway and Europe. The Norwegian pipelines of publication delivery, starting with the author, moving through the review process, ending with a final publication and archiving at the National Library, is something I have taken part in shaping. I have done it out of both interest and necessity, and it obviously impacts the presentation of this thesis in a very powerful way.

Because this is an essay outlining the research framework and the presentation of it, it seems logical to once again point out that my earlier statement about "have(ing) some core traits, and (observe) a myriad of happenings comes from those", makes a lot of sense. I did this, now I am enabled to do that in this way because of... and so on. Example: I am here, writing, because I have always written, just like I design this because I have always been a graphical designer, then similarly, I have always been, and still am, a web designer, and I am also a photographer; I'm a maker that exhibited at the Dutch Design Week both in 2024 and 2025, and so on and so forth.

The items I create tie together in a similar fashion: The DDW exhibitions, for example were, in 2025, the works Eidolon I & II, photographs on e-ink, shifting and evolving, showing analogue slide film pictures taken during DDW 2024, where Gnos Neris, a music bot made in collaboration with an engineering student at UiA was my contribution. In parallel I developed two display cases, one for each of my research albums, that again followed on the tail of the Itzama Stalagmite, displayed at BARE studenthus in Kristiansand, and at Gothenburg Fringe 2024, which also was the start of an entire line of abstract explorations, unhindered by a preset goal and a defined motivation outside of the PhD, enabled by the financial security the project provided, and expanding my artistic side, obviously, leading into an unknown forest where each step was unplanned, and followed much more a direction given by the magnitude of an ever-expanding backdrop than any sense of steering toward a defined end goal. It's a vectorization of artistic process, if you will, a career scaled and shaped by the direction it is given, powered by a conscious force acting in the background.

I could continue this reasoning for a long time... I own 10 tenant contracts of various office locations in Oslo, in spaces that I administer and rent out—does that make me a small-scale real estate guy also? I built my own studio in 2022, transforming a run-down machine workshop into a functional recording space, and prior to that I built a little house in my garden where I have my workspace for wood. Additionally I machine pitched resonators for fun, in my studio, using a metal lathe, again something completely different from the other things I do.

Identities are multiple, and multiply. If you define one, then you simultaneously create a need to make space for another, because defining means leaving out, but leaving out does not mean irrelevant. They are situational, emergent, context-dependent. When I sit behind a drum kit in a jazz trio, I enact one identity. When I program a synthesizer, I enact another. When I sing lyrics I have written, another still. These are not masks or disguises. They are genuine modes of musical being, each with its own history, its own knowledge and its own way of listening and responding.

The list will go on and on, and like in my research, it is very similar to a feedback machine, where ideas come and go, and everything is a reiteration that evolved from something prior. The line of reasoning can be cut off when realizing "of course this is the case, you are describing a human", and at that point it falls apart because of the obviousness of it. It's not possible to avoid this, I think, and I feel that it is necessary also, to come full circle, to the point where seemingly extremely complex processes can be shrugged off by stating "yes, that's obvious". That way you know the absolute start and the absolute end, and very often, those two are more or less the same.

The mention of this has a place here because it allows me to delimit the presentation to show only the parts directly connected to the research. Like music being embedded in identity, I assume, now, that complex is embedded into obvious. So, from this point on, I will not mention every little detail, and by doing that I trust (link to Trust essay) the reader to understand that when I presented my installation "In Rome" at the Gothenburg Fringe in 2025, or when I play a concert, or when you listen to my album "III" by placing and holding your finger in the middle of a screen, with headphones, forced to stay there, forced to make a choice on whether to listen or go do something else, there will always be a ton of elements behind it, both technical and theoretical, reasons for doing this instead of that, and almost always completely without randomness in the approach. The obvious is obvious because the complexity has been taken care of, it is no longer necessary to show, because the product is finished, and solid.

Contrasting the multiplicity of identity, personality is singular. It is the continuity that holds these identities together, the thread that runs through all the variations. It is what allows me to move between roles without losing coherence, and what makes the resulting music recognizably mine, even when it sounds nothing like what I made before. I don't think it's necessary to explain or research this any further in this project, so, like before, I'm asking that the relation, and tension, between

The research unfolded in three phases, each documented in the exposition that accompanies this text.

Startup began with the question and the existing material: years of recordings, methods, and habits. I tried to identify which aspects of my practice could be isolated, examined, and recombined. I built a theoretical "creation creation machine," inspired by cut-up techniques, to force unexpected combinations. The first major output was Spirit of Rain (2023), an album that used AI text generators to disrupt lyrical meaning and through that, expose the tension between linguistic and musical expression.

This marked the beginning of several pathways into new territory, but it should be noted that "new territory" is neither a new sonic territory, nor is it a new stylistic territory. Early on I made a distinction that proved foundational: "new music (for me)" versus "not new music (for me)." The latter is music that arises from habitual practice, from methods so internalized they no longer require naming. It may contain new elements, new ideas, but it emerges from an unspecified process. "New music (for me)" is different: it arises from a deliberately specified method, one that can be named, examined, and potentially transferred.

This distinction shaped everything that followed. The research is not about making music that sounds different. It is about making music through processes that are different, and documenting what that difference produces.

By forcing exploration like this, using randomness and external systems for creative feedback, the new territory is about breaking free from my own habits, establishing personal ground truths, or "elementary components", as I called it early on. What makes something an elementary component? I developed three criteria: it must have its own artistic value (it can stand alone); it must contribute more than just a sound (it must communicate something musically coherent); and it must be fundamental and defining for my expression (not incidental, but core). These criteria allowed me to identify what was essential versus what was merely habitual. This process started with text, then expanded, leading into phase two, deconstruction.

What I learnt from Spirit of Rain was that, even though productive and fun, the music itself revealed a conflict. The producer in me wanted sonic coherence—a finished surface where every element sits in its designed place, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The performer wanted space to improvise—to respond in the moment, to let the music go somewhere unplanned. With SOR, the production was so heavily implemented, so layered and arranged, that performing it live would have meant either reproducing the arrangement mechanically (sacrificing the performer) or departing from it (sacrificing the producer's work). I tried, and it did not work. This was not a failure; it was a finding. The conflict identified a boundary, and boundaries are information.

Deconstruction followed. Having reached an impasse, I began taking things apart, or, to begin with I thought I was taking them apart. In reality, I had created a black hole, that started expanding by feeding on anything within reach, and as it grew bigger, it swallowed more or less everything it came across and forced me to look at everything in a new light, piece by piece, with only a vague sense of connectivity between them. The Goodbye Intuition project (Grydeland et al., 2019) coined the term "intuition fatigue" for exactly this phenomenon—when the accumulated knowledge that should guide improvisation begins to feel like constraint rather than resource. My experience echoed this.

It was not particularly pleasant, and I could not stop it either, because if you start questioning everything, then there is no limit to the definition of "everything". This way of thinking isn't feeding back to itself in a meaningful way either, so, unless you are prepared to structure and reassemble, the picking apart is really just... picking apart. And, when you run out of things to pick apart, you start picking apart the reason for picking things apart, and it goes on and on like that, it really is like a black hole, an implosion of logic caused by the want to produce and the need to figure out where this want comes from.

In a more practical explanation, this process caused me to narrow my setup down. I imposed arbitrary constraints (if it fits on an IKEA kitchen island, it can stay, things like that), and experimented with removal rather than addition.

I made installations that stepped outside music entirely. I developed what I came to call "archival listening", a practice of engaging with my own accumulated work as a resource to draw from, remove from, and trust the listener to complete. The term relates to, but differs from, McLeod's (2023) use of "archival listening" to describe critical engagement with audio archives; here I mean something more personal: treating one's own body of work as a palimpsest to be revisited, sampled, and transformed.

Frankly, this phase was very uncomfortable. In the beginning it felt a little adventurous to set out dismantling something that had taken years to build, but in the end, dismantling was all I did. Putting pleasantries aside, it surely helped to clarify what was essential. By stripping away, I discovered that information does not disappear. It persists, invisibly, shaping new work even when it is no longer present on the surface, which, upon discovery, was what led me back to playing the drums, for example, something I largely stopped doing after the first year of the research.

Assemblage brought the pieces back together, but differently. Because of the fact that I now had a complete lack of reason (not a lack of want) for playing my instrument, I followed the path I was on, choosing it out of interest because the deconstruction had taught me that you absolutely have to start somewhere and taking an interest in anything is a choice. Through this I started to implement a "sense of actuality"—by which I mean: if you do something that is meant for something else than personal gratification, it implies that you have to try to deal with something actual, and that actuality has to be something that has impact, that is important. Current examples are personality and identity (like gender and the insane obsession some people have to decide what others can and cannot do), financial inequality, environmental issues, and many more. In my case, it's AI and technological leaps ahead, and the impacts of these, and again, because of interest and the work I did with various kinds of code, the actuality most interesting to me is the impact of technology, currently completely dominated by the notion of AI, which, to make matters worse, seems to be understood completely differently from person to person.

I began coding my own tools: Python scripts that generate sound according to rules I define, responding to live input without imitating human musicianship, then held back and thwarted when I realized this was a mere repetition of various generative compositional techniques, so... changed again, both in concept and output, but it still lived long enough to become "the Drift Engine", a system that listened, analyzed, and participated in real-time improvisation, through sound, also generated, in Supercollider.

The Drift Engine does not simulate a musician; it introduces a non-human voice with its own procedural tendencies, its own stubbornness, its own way of disrupting and inviting. The highlight of its usage, I think, being the track "Lullaby for Non-clarinetists". This is purely a personal notion, but I like the track, I like the simpleness of it, and I like that I can listen to it without really knowing all the bits and pieces of the machinery behind it.

In addition, I used it as part of an effort to explore musical trust without prior knowledge of the participating musician, and I did a live performance at SAR Porto with António Aguiar in the spring of 2025. The final usage is of course on the album III (2025), recorded with Juhani Silvola and Andreas Ulvo. Here, the Drift Engine was more of a creative catalyst, first effectively demanding that me and Juhani followed along with it, something that quickly came into conflict with the improvisational intuition me and Juhani already have. After playing with DE for hours on end, I stopped it, and that is when we really played what became the album III. What remained was music shaped by the machine's presence even in its absence.

The part from Andreas Ulvo was recorded later, by him, in a one take improvisation on top of a stereo file I sent him. There really was not much discussion while we did this, not between Juhani and I, and not between me and Andreas. My work with Juhani spans fifteen years; with Andreas, even more. We started playing in LS Duo in 2003, so, this duration matters. The trust documented on III is not instant rapport but accumulated understanding—the kind of knowledge that only time can build. The reasoning is in the music and in the playing, and, because I have a long-standing musical relation with both Juhani and Andreas, we can make it work like that, without losing a sense of importance and personal relevance.

What makes this album worthy of being a final representation of what is now the conceptual answer to a difficult research question, is that it transcends everything the question implies, and it is musically interesting, in itself. Like the Lullaby I made, I can listen to it as a piece of music, which essentially is an emotional statement or a piece of non-physical information. Langer (1957) called this "the morphology of feeling" made audible—a formulation I find useful because it positions music as the shape of emotion rather than its trigger. In my case, this means that the album communicates something about what it feels like to navigate multiple musical identities, without the listener needing to know that's what it's about. The communication happens through the music's own logic, its own unfolding, not through explanation. It is a complete artistic work, that has a place inside the current sonic landscape of free improvisation, adding to it, and, based on my own interpretation of this same landscape, bridging a gap between the dominating improvisational dialects and the influence of the more formally structured world of music-with-text, sometimes referred to as pop music, or singer-songwriter, or whatever terminology makes sense.

In other words, a long artistic research journey starting with forced exploration, then leading into exploring trust as a way to discover new pathways, then breaking everything down into fragments, before applying a sense of actuality as a core principle and by that reaching a state of mind where I shut off the machine and related only to the sounds produced by humans in a room, seems to be something that should have value and be considered a contribution to the field that I'm in.

As with many things I do, this also suffers under the simple logic of "it's easy if you know how to do it", but what sets this apart is the amount of time it has taken to reach this level of understanding, and I am for once willing to acknowledge that it can be insanely complex, especially if it seems simple and effortless. Maybe that is what the end goal for a performing artist is, to take something difficult and play it so that it seems easy, making the listeners enjoy instead of emphasize their lack of theoretical knowledge.

Method, process, reflection

Artistic research demands clarity about what counts as method, what counts as process, and what counts as reflection. These terms structure the exposition, but they deserve explicit definition. My approach here draws on Borgdorff's (2012) framework for artistic research and Nelson's (2013) model of practice-as-research.

Method refers to the deliberate, repeatable strategies employed to generate artistic knowledge. In this research, methods include: the use of AI and other tools as a semantic disruptor (Spirit of Rain); the imposition of physical and material constraints (the BROR setup, but also later in programmatic sense); the development of custom software tools (Drift Engine + CCM4 + Drummerboy + MD-trig); and the practice of archival listening (engaging with my own accumulated recordings as material to be transformed). Methods are transferable. They could, in principle, be used by others, though the results would differ.

Process refers to the contingent, time-bound unfolding of artistic work. It includes the experiments that failed, the detours, the moments of doubt, the accidental discoveries. Process is documented but not prescribed; it is the record of what actually happened, not a template for what should happen.

Reflection refers to the interpretive work that makes sense of method and process after the fact. It is the writing, the analysis, the contextualization. Reflection is not separate from artistic practice. It is part of it, but it occupies a different register. Where method is prospective and process is present, reflection is retrospective. It asks: what did I do, and what does it mean?

These three are not sequential. They interweave throughout the research, each informing the others. The exposition presents them as color-coded fragments, a way of making visible the texture of artistic research, where insight emerges not from linear argument but from the accumulation and juxtaposition of material.

The result as concept

The album III and the Porto concert are both results of this research, but they are not the same 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 might be obvious to many musicians, especially within the field of improvisation, but it deserves stating. The word "free" in an improvisational context has many flavors and many interpretations. Bailey (1993), in his foundational study of improvisation, distinguishes between "idiomatic" improvisation (which operates within the conventions of a particular musical style) and "non-idiomatic" or "free" improvisation (which attempts to avoid such stylistic reference entirely). Outside of this field, where I also connect, the notion of improvisation in itself has a very different meaning connected to it. In electronic music, people improvise, they say, with machines, never touching anything but buttons, never doing anything but turning a trigger on or off, on a fixed grid in a fixed time, then spending years trying to impose variation on those trigs. These two are extremes, of course, and knowing that a multitude of variations exist in-between them also, it seems necessary to mention my view and my interest.

It is also why this distinction matters. If the result were simply "the album," then the research would be reducible to a product. But the result is not a product; it is a kind of music, a way of making, a process that can be repeated without being replicated. The album documents one occurrence. The concert documents another. Together, they demonstrate that the research question—what kind of music arises?—can only be answered relationally, situationally, in the moment of performance.

This is why improvisation, trust and identities are all central to the project. Improvisation is not merely a genre or a technique; it is an epistemological mode. It allows identity to be enacted, contested, and transformed in real time. It foregrounds discovery over execution, relationship over role. In Bailey's (1993) terms, it is the practice where outcomes are not pre-determined, where the musician must constantly re-establish who they are through what they play. In my terms it's what makes everything I do come together as a whole, and from there it is what makes me able to solve complex problems as they appear, in this case, the problem stated as a research question.

Contribution

I want to be modest but clear about what this research contributes:

It contributes a documented practice of systematic deconstruction and reassembly as a method for artistic research—not a prescription, but an example that others might adapt.

It contributes a conceptual distinction between identity (multiple, emergent, performative) and personality (singular, continuous) as a lens for understanding improvisation and collaborative music-making.

It contributes the Drift Engine as an instance of what might be called procedural agency (drawing on Latour's [2005] distributed agency)—a machine that participates in musical interaction without imitating human intention, that has a recognizable voice without having consciousness.

It contributes the idea of archival listening—a practice of engaging with one's own accumulated work as a palimpsest, trusting that what has been removed still shapes what remains.

These are not revolutionary claims. They are articulations of things that many musicians know implicitly but rarely name. The value of artistic research, as I understand it, lies precisely in this naming: making visible the knowledge that is embedded in practice, so that it can be shared, questioned, and built upon.

A note on reading this exposition

The exposition that follows is not a linear argument. It is a fragmented pathway through material—sounds, images, texts, videos—organized loosely by chronology and tagged by function (method, process, result, reflection). It can be navigated in any order, though the three phases (Startup, Deconstruction, Assemblage) provide a rough arc.

The exposition operates in two registers, and it helps to understand the difference. The satellite essays are formalized reflection—explanation about the practice, written after the fact, with the clarity that comes from knowing where things ended up. They are meant to help the reader understand what I do and why certain things matter. The research timelines are different. They show the research as it actually unfolded: starting without a clear path, narrowing through trial and method, accumulating knowledge, arriving at results that could not have been predicted at the outset. The essays explain; the timelines enact. I think both are necessary. Essays without timelines would be abstraction without evidence—claims about a process no one can see. Timelines without essays would be evidence without orientation—material that might be interesting but hard to make sense of.

Some fragments are substantial; others are brief. Some are polished; others are raw. This is intentional. Research does not always arrive at its insights through careful reasoning. Sometimes you stumble upon them, recognize them only in retrospect, or discover them in the act of documentation itself.

The satellite essays linked throughout address specific topics in more depth: what musical identity means in this context; how method, process, and reflection are distinguished; why the Drift Engine matters; what III achieves. The appendixes provide fuller documentation of the major artistic outputs.

But the core of the research is not only in the texts. It is in the tension between the reflection and the music, in the soundscapes emerging from the collision of identities, the friction of facets, the negotiation between human and machine.

Jonas Sjøvaag
University of Agder, 2025

References

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Writing this thesis (in Charlotteburg, Berlin) © Jonas Sjøvaag 2025

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Inbound at Sola airport, for RC seminar at Uni of Stavanger © Jonas Sjøvaag 2025

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The Modern Musician © Jonas Sjøvaag 2025

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The island of Gear © Jonas Sjøvaag 2025