How Musical Is Dog? - An Interspecies Improvised Musical Collaboration

This paper outlines an interspecies improvised musical collaboration with Razzly the dog that utilises a pre-existing gestural DMI, the AirSticks, inside a fetch ball. The evolution of the collaboration across three significantly different performances over a year and across two cities is described, along with an outline of the mappings created. Through the lens of my experience as an improviser, instrument designer and dog guardian, and drawing from research into dog cognition, animal liberation, human-animal interaction, animal-computer interaction, zoömusicology and posthumanism, I explore the phenomena that is dog-human play, and draw comparisons between it and collaborative musical improvisation. Through the act of turning play into a musical performance, I discuss creativity, agency and consent, focusing on the social, collaborative and physical aspects of musicking, as opposed to the sound making itself, in an attempt to understand the way dogs (starting with this particular dog) might use play, ritual and perhaps even music-making, to navigate the world and connect with humans.