ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the metaphor of music for understanding what we do with technology and what technology does with us. Technology experience and use are revealed as embodied, skilful, social, and technologically mediated. Here the emphasis is on the development of skill (see also Dreyfus) and on improvisation. The chapter also raises the question of whether we are playing our instruments or whether the instruments (music instruments and others) also play us. This question becomes especially relevant when technologies such as artificial intelligence and smart technologies are more involved in our activities. Normative questions here include what or who composes our lives, what or who shapes its rhythm, and how much freedom we still have to improvise when technology writes the score or directs. The chapter also asks whether only human performers can properly be called “performers” and develops an answer to that question by responding to Godlovitch and posthumanism.
