Dissociation and interference in composers’ stories about music: the renewal of musical discourse

A generation ago, Philip Agre responded to a discourse-gap in his own area of artificial intelligence (AI) with an approach he termed Critical Technical Practice (CTP) (Agre 1997a). I will show how composition (in the broad sense described above) has much in common with the computational design Agre was discussing, and that the CTP he proposed might provide important indications for the development of more common, constructive and critical discourse in and around the creation of music.