Benjamin Louis Mawson

Friday, 18 October 2013

Concepts for Virtual Performance. Part 1.

Building music in the digital studio is directly crafting sound, rather than designing written instructions for it to be recreated by others.

In the digital studio we still write these instructions; they are refined and layered over multiple “rehearsals” with the machines in the virtual band, to create this thing, this performance, that is the heard work.

But it isn’t a thing. And I’ll come back to that.

Having written notes on paper for years (well, decades) I am now mostly using digital tools to manipulate found or partially-formed sound objects.

Problems about simulation are delicious because they are new and have not yet been answered with authority.

How far can we take the sound of the piano - seeming in respect of its touch and handling, as closely as possible to be 'played' - beyond the current capabilities of performer or instrument?

Many new questions dominate these compositional inquiries and the tentative development of a Concept of Virtual Performance is an attempt to address these.

With acousmatic music’s absence of palpable communication – from a player to a listener – there are problems for some in deciding how to encounter the music.

It does not seem to be like a told story where the teller and the tale are a part of the same experience.

The movie is the closest form in another medium and yet this - of course - contains representations of people and their interactions.

Even if without a traditional plot, the movie contains elements that are both within and outside (commenting on) the story - diegetic and exegetic elements - between which the viewer attempts to differentiate.

If music by unseen, inhuman hands is embedded in a space, blended with it, not directly presented but allowed to be experienced, a radically new relationship is formed between the artist and the listener, the listener and the work.

The seated listener at the symphony concert engages both with the sounds directly and something beyond them, which the sounds are perceived to embody.

So does the listener to a recording or at an acousmatic 'performance'.

But two profound differences intervene when we try to make a direct parallel.

Firstly, acousmatic music is not always discernibly distinct from its surroundings, because the place, for which the sound structure has been built, contains its own auditory character, activity and flux.

Secondly, there is not necessarily an intention to communicate a message, an object.

It may be that the sounds have been so organised to represent an analogue to a physical form or phenomenon, a process of change or a simultaneous condition of stasis and motion (a delirious favourite of mine, since hearing, as a child in the middle of an orchestra, Bartok’s Dance Suite.

**Incidentally, compare the Concertgebouw’s orchestral performance with Andras Schiff’s piano version for an example of the difficult matter of “what is a musical composition?”).

And the composer or sound artist no longer necessarily attempts to communicate in a quasi-linguistic form.

They may be asking you to consider the juxtaposition of two sounds. The pulsing that such a combination creates.

Two frequencies added. Each of them. Their total. Their difference.

All audible, whether between two violins slightly out of tune with each other or between more complex, harmonic textures that change slowly over time:

Now it is not the perceived commencing journey that is interesting,
- harmonic direction back towards its starting place -
but the shifting, restless sonic moment.

There maybe a mirroring of the place in the artifice apparently flung down there with such casual ease.

If it is possible – as I sorely hope – to de-reify music and composition,

to replace the idea of music as a ‘thing’, with the truer idea of an attempt at reconjuring fleeting dreams or visions,

such that a musical composition becomes less an isolated artefact and more a sensory element of the place it is encountered,

just as the noises of a building, street or seashore cave characterise our sense and memory of it, then…..

...then new functions for music,

transcending the ritualised offerings of music as ‘things’, with a social job to do, a message to impart,
as has existed in the concert hall and church setting for centuries,

may finally in some senses be achieved.

From a perspective of authenticity of reproduction

- be that reproductive of an entire illusion or a construct of recording -

headphone-audition offers a more believable experience than speaker arrays and can be used to create a more illusory boundary between environmental noise and the deliberate contents of the sonic artefact.

Unfortunately, for anyone reading this who says

“Yes, but what the hell happened to art that makes sense, tells a recognisable tale that we can discuss as though it were an object covered in symbols whose meaning is widely agreed?”,

I have some difficult news.

In Hervé Vanel’s study on John Cage and Muzak, or what French composer Eric Satie advocated in the 1920s as ‘furniture music’,
he refers to Lev Thermin's 1919 electronic musical instrument, the Theremin.

(A recent resurgence in interest in the Theremin after a period of oblivion, accompanies the accelerated development of digital musical interfaces like the Eigenharp and the Håken Continuum)

To quote,

“As Cage perceived it, the Theremin was undoubtedly ‘an instrument with genuinely new possibilities…nevertheless, the problems remained that the Thereministes…did their utmost to make [it] sound like an old instrument…performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past” and that it “amounted to imitating the past rather than constructing the future.”

Cage complained that the new affordances of this radically different sound-producing object were being ignored, betrayed even, by a continued pursuit of old practices, the hunt for old meanings through new tools.

Implicit is the futility of finding a new means of sound production if it is only to be used for making “old” sorts of sounds.

Another advocate of new technological affordances for the discovery of new ways to communicate new things, was Edgard Varèse in “The Liberation of Sound”:

“the new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the vertical resultants: chords, their arrangements, their spacings, that is, their oxygenation.
Not only will the harmonic possibilities of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor but the use of certain interferences created by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution.
The never before thought of use of the inferior resultants and of the differential and additional sounds may also be expected. An entirely new magic of sound!
I am sure that the time will come when the composer, after he has graphically realized his score, will see this score automatically put on a machine, which will faithfully transmit the musical content to the listener.”

Varèse' prescience could not have foreseen the specific challenges of turning automated transcription and transmission into music or the ironically arising insecurities of digital preservation.

We are still though in a very ‘primitive’ technological state.

We have new, magical tools whose affordances for sonic production we are still learning to match - whether due to ability or willingness - with new, magical thinking.

To sound ourselves in languages entirely different from those we have ever spoken.

Furthermore, Varèse' and others’ predictions

- that automata could be well enough instructed to deliver, without intervention, ‘soundscapes’ whose richness of expression equals or surpasses the possibilities of acoustic performance -

could neither anticipate the dependence of users on ‘plugins’ to “re-humanise” an entirely quantised sound.

Just as an aside - it seems so counter-intuitive to first input uniform sound data then use automation to make it seem human, an embodiment of some notion that two machine processes can equate to one human one?

Humanising or giving the appearance of sentient, mediated, 'delivery' (note please, not 'performance') must be the most exciting challenge of our new digital tech

- and yet celebration of the tools themselves seems to take precedence over using them to do something,

at once enough of a continuation of extant practice to be a recognisably communicative form,

and yet to make a promising departure from it. . . .

The complex arts of simulating human agency in things at once physiologically or cognitively impossible and yet plausible - these are my obsessions.

I have never met any other composer or artist in another medium who shared these fascinations.

It seems strange to me that the digital studio should be so shortly explored as a means

- not only as it widely is, of creating new 'unrealities' but -

of extending the plausible yet impossible.

Of permitting what Bach and Scriabin could only imagine but never dare to transcribe for fear that it was inaudible to all but them.

Digital music seems either to involve MIDI for acoustic composer to demonstrate to performers or an exploration of the tangibly inhuman, whether in house, trance or electroacoustic languages,

of sounds that (in the latter) carry little connection to the neuro-physiological activity that thousands of generations of practice and inheritance have stamped upon our tiny, biological responses to stimuli.

And of course, makers of music in all fields remain suspicious of each other’s ability to speak credibly; the same tribalisms exist as, for example, when fighting broke out over the reported death of tonality, more than a hundred years ago.

A universe of expressive, evocative possibility lives in the tools and yet the fact of their ‘machine-ness’ seems to remain problematic, necessary to remember, like noting but avoiding acknowledgement of a person’s difference.

Varèse speaks from an age of detailed, manual craft,

with a vision of the same application, of commitment, to its implementation through tools then unavailable;

he cannot foresee the cultural changes, or absence of them in music composition that will eventually be engendered by these tools.

Maybe it’s that they are still just too new to us and the new digital instruments are still in their infancy;

but as he foresaw, we are already finding it

“necessary to abandon staff notation and to use a kind of seismographic writing much like the early ideographic writing originally used for the voice before the development of staff notation.

Formerly the curves of the musical line indicated the melodic fluctuations of the voice, today the machine-instrument requires precise design indications.”

Friday, 11 October 2013

Sweet Chicago Suite - - Ray Anderson's Pocket Brass Band

I've just returned from Berlin and Innsbruck, first for the "Functional Sounds Conference" and then to meet my week old niece, Maja.

On the train from Munich to Innsbruck, I met some musicians in the restaurant car, travelling to their gig that night, at the Treibhaus.

Visiting family far away and catching up with everyone, the gig was over before we had left the house.

We met the band afterwards in the bar and spent a fine evening chewing the cud about rhythm, virtuality, trumpeter Lew Soloff's interest in the neuro-physiology of musical performing, mine in the geo-location of sounds and bandleader Ray Anderson's recent foray into global jamming via the Web.

They are called the Ray Anderson Pocket Brass Band. To my shame I hadn't heard of them.

I bought their CD "Sweet Chicago Suite" and started listening on the plane back to England.

The shockingly amazing, funny and clever mixture of carnivalesque New Orleans marching band with bop-inflected, poly-rhythmic counterpoint blew me away.

These four guys - Trombone, Trumpet, Sousaphone and Drums - make an enormous, orchestral sound.

Complex and rich, funny, warm and compelling.

All the compositions on this disc are highly structured yet full of spontaneous call and response, sudden and gradual processes of change calling on all Matt Perrine's sousaphonic genius to underpin the harmonies while Bobby Previte's drums are a showcase in controlled understatement and wit.

Everyone should own a copy of this music. It will make you laugh aloud with delight.

Buy (and preview) Sweet Chicago Suite here

Tuesday, 8 October 2013

More notes from "Functional Sounds, 2013"

“Noise(s) as Music” Solveig Ottman

noise: “any undesired sound either one that is intrinsically objectionable or interferes with other sounds that are being listened to” Encyclopedia Brittanica Online.

The sounds of MRT examined

Magnetic resonance tomography – 3D imaging by creating ‘slices’ or layers at any point through a structure

tomo- = cut

graph- = writing

music: “the art and science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds or tones in varying melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre especially so as to form structurally complete and emotionally expressive compositions.” Webster online.

Functional Sounds Conference, Berlin

Functional Sounds

http://soundstudies.eu/2013conference

1^st Conference of

European Sound Studies Association

Humboldt University, Berlin, 4-6 October 2013

Day One - four of many speakers at this eclectic conference of the newly formed ESSA.

First keynote, "Earth's functional sounds" from Douglas Kahn

(National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW, Australia)

sets the scene for an eclectic cross-disciplinary discussion on Functional Sound,

its reading, writing, emplacement,

significative or narrative role in explaining space and time and

uses from the political to torture, story-telling and cultural ecology.

"With the nineteenth century advent of modern telecommunication technologies,

noise and odd little sounds, some of them musical, existed alongside

the conversations and information exchanges of communications.

Many were considered to be interference but others were recognised as

the sound and music of a new nature, an electromagnetic one,

the knowledge of which also evolved significantly with the nineteenth century. . . .

Instead of a default Olympian gaze, this talk will present only

the smallest sonic breaches in the ideal,

veritable Pythagorean commas in communications dreams of a

complete annihilation of space and time, as they have been engaged in the arts.

Commas in music, after all, were an adaptation to the noise of the real."

Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton) spoke entertainingly on

“Making Cycling Sound(s)”: bicycles own sounds and 'political' uses of

air horns like those of lorries (which cause 50% of UK cyclist road deaths).

I wonder how placing cone horns and compressed air tanks

on an adapted bicycle (now capable of 178 decibels) will persuade

truck drivers to stop killing cyclists and if the biggest,

most dangerous machines on the roads are only killing half of the

cyclists who die, what unforgivable idiocy and neglect

of fundamental duties to good sense are causing the other half?

The talk moves into more fecund, more sonic territory, where

elements of designed environmental sound are considered:

these may be individual or collective.

They may have social, political or artistic motives.

By contrast to the usual practice of creating sound in spaces -

"designing sound in"- they may also constitute cancellation

or removal of sound - "designing sound out"

to create "privatised listening environments" with headphones.

Or using sound as a controller of spaces and their users:

programme music used to code a space,

making it unattractive to non-consumers. (Stern)

see Frauke Behrendt: "The Sound of Locative Music", Convergence 18 (3)

Anette Vandso (University of Aarhus) gave a wide-ranging talk

with excellent examples on "Political Potentials of Sound Art"

How does sound art permit and/or lead us to

- Explore - Interrogate - Intervene

in a political and/or social context?

Where the designed-in exclusion of sound exteriority was

breached by importing 'noise' sounds, this was, in its earliest stages,

a highly subversive and resonant act:

permissive of a hitherto absolute aesthetic and political taboo.

Luigi Russolo called the concert hall a

"hospital for anaemic sound" (Art of Noise, 1913)

It is increasingly hard to imagine living and working in this cultural situation.

The shift from music to noise-sounds invites and

incites a new democratisation of sound communication.

Some political potentials of sound art identified by Vandso

- Participation - Representation/aesthetic indeterminacy

- Eventness/Becoming - Power/Control

Examples discussed/shown:

* Hom Kai Wang (2010) "Music While We Work"

Taiwan Pavilion, Venice Biennale

* Yu Hsien Su (2010) "Sound of Nothing"

Taiwan Pavilion, Venice Biennale

* Anke Eckhardt (2010)

"Between You and Me is a Wall of Sound"

* Dick Higgins: Danger Music No. 17 (1962)

A musical score containing only instructions to the performer to scream.

Mark Grimshaw (University of Aalborg) presents

"Living between the virtual and real worlds"

- prefacing the talk with the warning that

since committing to the title some months previously,

his thinking has moved on - he challenges the

accepted distinctions between, asking whether

listening to any recorded sound is not a virtual experience.

Phonomnesis, remenances, other auditory illusions.

Problems with definitions of sound as either wave, event or perception of event,

the cross-functionality of senses, being at once autonomic, perceptual and affective.

The perception of having perceived sound can after all be obtained from other senses

than hearing: the cochlear implant converts acoustic signals to electrical energy

which stimulates the cochlea.

The sound itself is therefore no longer being perceived….

The animated pub discussion that follows with

Kevin Logan (http://theearoftheduck.wordpress.com) and

Fergus Kelly ((http://livecomposition.wordpress.com)

sees us trying to formulate our own distinct positions on a

continuum between these ostensible poles of "live" and "virtual".

Kevin is the most extreme, arguing that all live listening being mediated by

memory and associative reference, only first encounter with the

entirely alien can be said not to have elements of virtuality.

Grimshaw also touches on Game Transfer Phenomena (Gortari, Aaronson, Griffiths, 2011, International Journal of Cyber Behaviour, Psychology and Learning), characterised by

(1) delayed release of immersion on returning to the physical environment and

(2) temporary obscuring on returning to physical environment of distinctions

between reality and virtuality.

GTP is based on studies of actions - is game sound different?

Action/behaviour transfer has palpable consequences whereas sound or perception

transfer need not and is less easily quantified.

That sound is both perceptual and virtual was touched upon, the distinction

between virtual and real only relating perhaps to the sound's provenance.

Environment, memory and affect arguably essential to comprehensive definitions of sound.

Treating sound as potential, as virtuality can engender new approaches.

Bio-feedback for user-centric sound design development: EMR, ECG, etc

Direct Brain-To-Brain communications in humans?

A pilot study (video shown) at

University of Washington, Seattle, August 2013 (NSL with CDDL).

Literally mind-blowing.

Conversion of user 1's deterministic thought patterns send

guiding signal to user 2, who presses a keyboard button:

It was unclear whether the required information was for

User 2 to hit the target or the correct time to press the trigger -

Anyway, whoops and hollers came from the young geeks as

User 2 consistently appeared to act correctly on receiving telepathic instruction.

Situated cognition, argues MG

primarily comprises

* one or more continual feedback loops

* between stimuli in the environment as perceived and

* responses to subsequently experienced sense of

* cumulative context of that which has already occurred or been perceived to occur

I would add that augmentation of the environment,

specifically in situated listening that blends real with virtual

necessarily makes recognition of those feedback loops impossible.

WIthout blurring of the two, no augmentation can be achieved.

Arguably, memory can also be tricked, in this context,

to re-identification of familiar as new, new as repetitive, other combinations:

not just loops but all manner of cognitive shapes can be made

to appear momentarily, like hallucinatory audible bubbles,

before vanishing upwards into the sky.

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