Composing after the instrument.

An artistic question before a technical answer.

POST-MUSIC is an artistic research project led by Hatem Béjar with Postune. It begins with voice, percussion and a question: where does the musical gesture lie when the instrument is also a relationship with a generative system?

Here, the term names an open enquiry. It announces neither the end of music nor a definitive new genre. It asks how a sensibility remains recognisable as the ways of producing, choosing and transforming sounds shift.

Composing also means deciding what will not remain.

In this research, generative artificial intelligence is part of the compositional process. A proposed sound is not yet a work. Listening, reworking, editing, refusing and making connections gradually give the material a direction.

The aim is to make this work observable: what was kept, what was removed and how an intervention changes the listening experience. Artistic responsibility does not disappear because some sounds are produced at a distance from the instrumental gesture.

Three experiments to develop.

The displaced instrument: start with a voice, a strike or a rhythmic memory, then observe what survives or changes as this material passes through a generative system.

Composition as dialogue: document proposals, listening and versions to understand how a decision becomes musical.

The living composition: explore whether a work can accommodate variations linked to listening or audience participation while retaining an identity. This is a research hypothesis, not an announcement of a completed installation.

Returning to what we hear.

This enquiry stays connected to the works. In Between Two Syllables, allowing a voice to arrive changes our experience of time. In Undanced, movement and absence coexist. These pieces offer starting points for listening; they do not claim to prove the hypotheses of POST-MUSIC on their own.

Musical studies, traces of the process and ways of sharing it may extend the research. Their formats remain to be explored. Artists, musicians, researchers and anyone curious about these transformations are invited into dialogue with Postune.