Error as Music Composition: Human and Material Agencies

What does it mean to err in music, and in what ways can error be used to creative advantage? We can open-up some interesting spaces for thought when we consider how musicians and composers make mistakes, and how they are read by audiences and peer groups. This chapter begins by outlining the normative understanding of error in music via the perceptual psychology research of Leonard Meyer and David Huron. The second section problematises this with examples from jazz and Experimental Music, genres that foreground the creative possibilities of error to a greater extent than the norm. The final section will discuss several case studies from my own compositions in which error and ambiguity play a central role; (1) those that rely on the accuracy-gap between human and computer and (2) those that foreground a balancing act between human and material agencies.