“Does not compute”? Music as real-time communicative interaction.

Mainstream operationalisations of music in contemporary digital culture tend to take forms that fit with Western folk-theoretic conceptions of music: as discrete sonic entities—songs, pieces, works—that fall within an autonomous domain of human experience, that have determinate structure and that have both affective and exchange value. This perspective is problematised in alternative digital manifestations of music as constituted in and through interaction, in which music is emergent from interactive processes that are computationally mediated. This alternative digital approach fits with broad conceptions of music that are grounded in ethnomusicological accounts and that have increasing weight in the cognitive sciences, in which music is understood and explored as a communicative medium. This paper will outline some of the possibilities, potentials and problems for digital approaches that are likely to arise in operationalising music as communicative interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]