Musical Empathy in Digital Space

Due to recent developments in socio-cultural as well as technological terms, music is increasingly being revealed as a phenomenon of digital spaces and information technology. During the pandemic, when musical life took place almost exclusively online, a tremendous reinforcement and acceleration of this process was experienced.
Pianist Igor Levit, an internationally acclaimed interpreter of Beethoven’s music who regularly engages with political issues on Twitter, even developed a new digital performance format. At the beginning of the pandemic, he streamed daily concerts from his living room. For these digitally transmitted "house concerts", which were met with a resounding audience response, he received the "Bundesverdienstkreuz der Republik Deutschland". The reason given for the award was that despite the physical isolation, the digital events enabled a feeling of togetherness across borders, creating a space of mutual empathy. Levit's musical performances indirectly referred to the motto that Ludwig van Beethoven used for his Missa solemnis, with "Von Herzen – Möge es wieder – Zu Herzen gehn!" becoming "From my house may it go to your house". As a response to the war in Ukraine, the pianist recently expanded his concept and organized house concerts in cooperation with other artists to raise funds for the victims of the war.

The example of Levit's house concerts stands metonymically for the fact that the fields of music production and composition as well as those of music performance and reception have for quite some time been increasingly dominated by digitization on the one hand and algorithmization on the other. Today, it is no longer only people who compose music, as the spectacular performance of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony in Bonn in 2021 demonstrated. The symphony, only rudimentarily sketched by Beethoven himself, was completed with the help of artificial intelligence.

The musicians of the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, who premiered the piece, engaged during the performance not only with the great 19th century composer, but also with algorithmic outputs. The fact that music as a human impulse is externalized in this way into digital technologies can be seen in many forms today, for example in so-called "live coding", a composition practice with algorithms that takes place synchronously to the performance. It is also evident in the contemporary listening practice of electronic dance music, for which the audience is no longer present in the club, but – without dancing – follows the DJ live via the Internet at home in front of a screen. Against this backdrop, the widespread shift from live performance to live streaming of opera and instrumental music that we have witnessed across the board in the last two years is merely a logical continuation of a trend towards the digitization of our musical lives that began some time ago.

Given this evolution towards a digital and digitized music, ontological and aesthetic questions emerge: To whom, to what entity are we listening when we watch a musical hologram of Maria Callas? Who is producing the audible result here? And why do we pay attention to such artificial appearances as "music deepfakes", which imitate the voice of a human singer with algorithmic power? How does the communication process between audience and musicians, which is constitutive for every musical performance and which we call feedback, work when we receive performances online, and what does this digital frame do to the music itself? Behind such ontological and aesthetic questions ultimately lies a larger philosophical question: how does the digital condition change the self-image of those subjects who compose, perform, and listen to music? In the blink of an eye we have arrived at the great philosophical concept of the human subject.

Significant strands of European and American philosophy have described the human subject as having not only an outside, but also an inside that is filled with life. To be a subject, then, is to be at once visible to the outside and withdrawn to the inside. Against this background, communication among humans often serves as a means to learn something about the inside of another person, about his or her intentions, thoughts, and emotions, and it seems that empathy is necessary for this - the ability to imagine another person’s thoughts and feelings in order to understand them better. Music lovers as well as musicologists, such as David Trippett¹ , perhaps imagine what Beethoven might have thought and felt when he composed his symphonies. Similarly, they probably attempt to empathize with pianists such as Igor Levit while listening to his interpretation of Beethoven sonatas. What does the interpreter think about the music he plays? Why does he perform like this? Whether such empathetic reactions occur automatically or depend on a social skill that must be learned is a question that remains to be answered.²

Another fact, however, is obvious: the Western concept of music is inseparable from that of the human subject, and is therefore also inconceivable without the aforementioned striving for empathy on the part of those human participants who are involved in what we might call the action of musicking. But with whom and for what purpose are we empathetic in a form of music that is no longer just a matter of the human subject, but has expanded into transhuman contexts with the help of digital technologies?

Public musical life as well as the science dealing with music as an anthropological fact are facing fundamental questions concerning the conditions under which the musical communication process can take place as an emphatic one in the digital cosmos. The discussion will be largely ignited by the new digital realism of streamed concerts and musical holograms and the concrete question of whether we as humans will learn to be emphatic in the future on the basis of these digital fictions. It is remarkable that the audience for musical holograms knows exactly that no living person with thoughts and feelings is performing, and yet the performances still trigger strong emotions. There is obviously a tendency for us to ignore the virtual nature and unreality of such performances in order to experience human responses such as empathy in this way.