Systems of Musical Agency: What Technology Teaches Us About How We Make Music

Dr. Adam Vidiksis (Department of Music Studies, Temple University)

Musical agency emerges in the shared space where humans, their tools, and their environment shape one another. Composition and performance can be understood through this lens—how these elements share, negotiate, and transform musical action. In this talk, Adam Vidiksis explores how musical systems shape and reveal the ways musicians think, listen, and act. His work with interactive electronics, algorithmic architectures, environmental scores, and performer-responsive systems shows how technology can externalize cognitive processes such as attention, prediction, and embodied decision-making. Drawing on examples from his own artistic practice, Vidiksis argues that automation plays a crucial role in this reveal: when a technology takes over certain musical tasks, it clarifies what human agency actually contributes. Just as recording and sampling reshaped our sense of virtuosity, contemporary tools expose layers of musical intuition and negotiation that were previously hidden. Placed alongside the broader ecosystem of system-oriented compositional approaches that foreground questions of agency—who or what holds it and how it shifts within a system—these practices demonstrate that rulesets of varying complexity can give rise to system-wide, emergent musical behaviors. These practices illuminate music as a dynamic interplay between humans and the systems they inhabit—and offer new insight into creativity, perception, and the construction of musical meaning.

Adam Vidiksis is an American drummer, composer, and music technologist whose work explores the entanglement of humanity with the machines we build. Based in Philadelphia, he serves as Associate Professor and Director of Music Technology & Composition at Temple University. His compositions are performed worldwide and have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission, and the American Composers Forum, as well the 2025 Established Artist Fellowship for the Delaware Division of the Arts. He works across media with audio processing, gestural controllers, AI-driven systems, and multimedia installation. He performs with SPLICE Ensemble, Aeroidio, and the Miller/Vidiksis/Wells trio, and serves as conductor for Philadelphia’s Network for New Music. A dedicated champion of new work, he has premiered hundreds of compositions by artists from around the world, continually seeking meaning through sound, technology, and human connection. [www.vidiksis.com]

This event is free and open to the public.