Toward a Technological-Creative Question1
By Gabriel Mora-Betancur
Abstract
This text reflects on the act of composing beyond its traditional understanding, proposing that composition exists whenever there is a notation, indication, or stimulus whether sonic or visual. From this premise, a central question emerges: whether the medium in which the creative process is inscribed transforms the very act of creation itself. To address this question, the concept of inscription is developed from the perspective of media philosophy, particularly drawing on Friedrich Kittler, understanding technical media not as neutral supports but as material conditions that shape what can be created, perceived, and thought.
The text expands this reflection toward contemporary creative practices such as studiobased music creation, commercial production, and collaborative processes, where authorship is distributed among composers, performers, producers, and sound engineers. In these contexts, sound manufacturing and technical inscription directly affect the final outcome: the phonogram. Finally, it is proposed that considering inscription as an active component of creative processes allows for the transformation of modes of creation, in line
1 Original text: https://sulponticello.com/iii-epoca/hacia-una-pregunta-tecnologica-creativa/
with the extended mind theory of Andy Clark and David Chalmers, thereby opening a horizon of continuity and future experimentation.
Introduction
To compose that word that intimidates with its aura of genius, of a finished, sealed, and irreproachable work has become an object of inquiry beyond conventional musical practice. Traditionally, understanding what it means to composehas implied imagining an individual endowed with a creative gift who produces closed and reproducible sonic works. However, upon closer examination, the act of composing unfolds as a much broader field: it is inscribed within relations, indications, stimuli, media, and technologies that condition both how and what is composed.
The article “When Do We Speak of Composing?” raises precisely this discussion and tentatively concludes that whenever there exists some form of notation, indication, or stimulus whether sonic or visual there is composition. This opens a range of questions about the very nature of this act of creation.
This seemingly simple definition compels us to rethink the boundaries between composition, interpretation, and performance: is the performer a creative collaborator? Can a visual stimulus be as constitutive as a musical score? What does the presence of notation imply in the emergence of a work? And what happens when notation itself dissolves or is altered by the technological media we use to capture or produce sound?
In this sense and following the line of thought initiated in that text the act of writing or inscribing can no longer be understood as a mere static record; it becomes an operator that transforms the very act of creation.
What is at stake, therefore, is not only the ontology of music or of a composed work, but the technicity of the creative act: the medium in which one writes, records, transmits, or produces sound alters composition. This question does the medium modify the act of creating? demands that we think of composition not merely as a result, but as a technological process in which media function as conditions of possibility for the emergence of sensible forms.
Inscription as Problematic
To advance this reflection, it is useful to articulate the concept of inscription within the framework of media philosophy, particularly through Friedrich Kittler. Kittler argues that media are not merely neutral surfaces upon which information is deposited, but possess a materiality and technical agency that condition both the content and the form of what is inscribed.
From this perspective, inscription is not simply writing notes on a staff or recording sounds on a physical or digital medium; it is an operation mediated by technologies that both structure and limit the expressive possibilities of a work. Inscription is a technical act that
defines fields of possibility: a traditional staff delimits what can be represented and how; a digital production environment imposes parameters and formats that are far from neutral.
Under this light, notation and writing are not merely representations of something that already exists in the composer’s mind, but technical conditions that participate in the construction of what we understand as a work.
Media archaeology teaches us that every notation or recording is a product of its support, of its technological grammar. In electroacoustic music, or in works such as Artikulation by György Ligeti, the relationship between sounds depends as much on compositional decisions as on the medium that made it possible to record and manipulate those sounds on magnetic tape. If we were to imagine this work without that technical medium, our conception of it would be unrecognizable, since the technology of recording and assembly becomes constitutive of the composition itself. Here, the idea proposed by Michel Chion that each technology contributes a characteristic sonic color is particularly relevant.
Beyond music, visual artworks, cinema, architecture, or literature illustrate this point: a cave painting inscribed on stone is not technically equivalent to a digital image projected onto a screen. Each medium carries its own limits, affordances, and perceptual conditions. Technical inscription thus becomes a fundamental actor in the creative process, anchoring composition within the materiality and rules of the medium.
Other Ways of Creating
When inscription is understood as a technical dimension of the creative act, it becomes evident that other modes of creation exist that do not fit within the traditional image of the individual composer mastering a score. Many contemporary practices involve collaborative processes, complex technologies, and distributed roles among multiple human and nonhuman agents.
A paradigmatic example is Soundpainting, a gestural language system for live composition in which the composer (or soundpainter) uses signs to direct musicians, actors, and dancers, generating sonic and visual forms in real time. This practice challenges the rigid separation between “composition” and “interpretation”: creation is distributed among multiple bodies, gestures, and responses, and the traditional score is replaced by a system of visual and technical indications that mediate sonic action differently.
In contexts of popular or commercial studio music, this phenomenon becomes even more evident. Musical creation is no longer a solipsistic act of the genius composer, but a process of sound manufacturing involving producers, sound engineers, arrangers, programmers, and even algorithms. Each technical decision from microphone selection to digital effects processing profoundly alters the final result: the phonogram that reaches the audience.
The producer or sound engineer is not merely a technical executor, but a co-author of the result. Their intervention shapes form, timbre, spatiality, and the aesthetic character of the work.
This shift is not accidental: contemporary music production technologies (such as DAWs, synthesizers, and plugins) incorporate design logics that act as co-creative agents. The way a beat is programmed, a voice is processed, or a track is mixed is mediated by technical procedures that push toward certain styles, genres, and aesthetics.
As a result, “composition” involves a complex network of technical and human agents, and inscription now extended into sound manufacturing becomes part of a flow of decisions where it is no longer possible to clearly delimit who composes and who produces.
Thus, the creative act is distributed: the performer improvises, the producer designs timbres, the engineer shapes sonic space. All participate in a process of technical-sensorial interaction that generates a meaningful final product. In other words, the technical inscription of sound and its manufacturing is not a passive support, but an element that transforms creative practices, and therefore the very idea of composition.
Inscription, Creative Processes, and the Extended Mind
If we accept that inscription and technical media constitute active conditions in creation, then we must reconsider how to think about creative processes in any artistic discipline. Far from the romantic figure of the solitary composer immersed in an inner world, the creative act is configured as an extended flow of agents, techniques, and sensible environments.
In this sense, our understanding of creation approaches the idea of the extended mind proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, where cognitive processes are not confined within the brain but extend through tools, environments, and external practices.
The extended mind thesis suggests that, under certain conditions, the tools we use become part of the cognitive process itself: a notebook, a calculator, or a digital interface are not merely auxiliary instruments, but co-constitutive of our intellectual operations.
If we apply this logic to composition, then writing, recording, producing, mixing, and even performing are not secondary to creativity but components of a distributed cognitive process that includes technical media as part of the creative mind.
Thus, technical inscription becomes a constitutive part of the mind that creates: the emerging work is not merely the product of an internal intention, but the manifestation of a technical-cognitive network involving supports, interfaces, notational systems, gestures, algorithms, and collaborative practices.
This framework invites us to think of creation as an open, ongoing process, where forms are not fully anticipated within an individual mind but emerge through interaction with media and other agents.
This has profound implications: if we always use the same technical resources, our compositions will tend to reproduce the same forms and aesthetic possibilities. To radically transform creative processes, we must transform the technicities with which we work,
exploring new ways of inscribing, interacting, and producing sound and other sensible signs.
This transformation is not merely a change of tools, but a shift in technical episteme that allows us to imagine other creative cosmologies what Yuk Hui would call other cosmotechnics of creation in which media do not homogenize but diversify expressive possibilities.
Such a conclusion is not meant to be definitive, but to open a continuity of thought: to recognize that inscription, far from being a simple record, is a technical gesture that participates in the genesis of works, and that exploring new forms of technical mediation can lead to unprecedented modes of composition, perception, and aesthetic experience.