When I
started building an engine (3DBARE) to allow the listener to walk inside a piece of
music, I thought it was a tool to help me carry on doing what I was doing –
just a better way of listening.
 |
| Listeners at geo-located music with noTours for Android |
But allowing
a listener to determine the temporal content of music by their position and
route through space means that all or many of the former controls held by the
composer / performer / producer are removed.
The listener
is in charge: they are attracted or repelled by sounds and their combinations,
and they negotiate a path ‘blindly’, feeling without signposting for a way
through the experience.
If the ‘work’
presented tells a story or – now more likely – allows a series of associations
between the materials experienced and personal memory, visceral responses to
these, thereby giving the listener the tools to construct their own narrative,
how can we determine the outcome, some aspects of the whole?
 |
| Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori |
The narrative
of a ‘classical work’ is necessarily abandoned. Its message resides as firmly
in form as in tonal colour and harmonic content.
The formula –
of embarking on a sometimes choppy but ultimately protected journey before
returning to the comfortable shores of the original key (and ‘tune’) – has, for
all but a few music-makers, become necessarily historical.
The scope
which we now enjoy for example of the exploration of textures was simply
impossible in the pre-electronic age.
Digital
transformation of the familiar and unfamiliar into and through each other lets
us explore weird new identities.
The skewed
reality of dreams becomes communicable, merging and overlaying in impossible
but plausible juxtapositions allows music to reflect the complexities of our
sensory and cognitive experience.
Music is not
something we present people, like a cake or a pair of shoes.
Music is the
ordering into communicative structures of sound.
You cannot
touch, see or smell sound.
You cannot
write anything about it that approaches the reality of hearing those sounds.
So why have
we spent a couple of centuries telling ourselves that the musical composition
was an object like a cake, like shoes, like a painting?
I refer you
to the million-word discussions of others on this thorny matter.
 |
| Morton Feldman |
My business
is struggling to make the er, not-stuff, that music is.
So if we want
a narrative in our music, let’s put one there.
I witness
stories on the top deck of London buses, as I drive through landscape, sit in a
city square.
Amalgamations
of snapshots, overheard snippets, accents, phrases, references, calling up an
un-knowable back story from every voice, each noise that flashes past and
evaporates.
Composers
cannot hope to control the tale they tell: there is no more agreement about the
import of a Mozart string quartet than those of Morton Feldman.
We do though,
have access to an unprecedented level of complexity in the material we present
to our audience and the combinations in which these may, endlessly, be sensed.
The big issue
for me has been how to deliver all this magical, vertiginous potential: no one
can play it, read it, hum it.
Sounds that
cannot be reproduced.
Combinations
that cannot be heard if sounding all at once.
 |
| Varese composing Poeme Electronique |
Here’s what
we do: let the listener combine the materials as they proceed, like Amelie
collecting photo booth snaps, or Cage with his same-different-same seas of
traffic.
Why don’t we
present the listener with a shoebox full of letters (maybe some distractions
thrown in, certain pages strategically removed) – and ask them to tell us the
life story of the unknown protagonist?
Then we can
proceed beyond the need for a narrative altogether: removing the imposition of
structure, particularly the temporal, is not an act of abandonment, of
irresponsibility – it is the most generous gift you can make to an audience.
To present
them with a collection of the most closely, finely wrought pieces of work
possible, in placements and combinations that have been tested, over and again,
until the swirling whole, this whirlpool of memory and desire, amusement,
terror, revulsion, meditative curiosity, rage, sleepy contentment, laughter
become not a fixed structure but like the inner and outer worlds flapping like
Einstein’s dimensions against each other as we walk between them.
 |
| Painting landscape with sound |
It is the
fluidity of virtual narratives that can bring the virtual to life.
