Musicality and Performance
Musicality
Firstly, discussion with my supervisors and reflection on this journal has uncovered a gap in my documentation that is ominously music-shaped. As this project is being completed at a musical institution and is concerned with music performance, I thought it prudent to give a quick overview of my musical influences, aspirations and how this project works to achieve them. To give a sonic example of what is discussed below, feel free to play the above piece.
To begin with, I am interested predominantly in long form, minimal or ambient musics concerned primarily with the exploration of texture and timbre before harmony and rhythm, often viewing the latter as tools to achieve the former. This is mirrored in my performances, for which the preparation often consists more of patching the synthesiser or selecting what I will supply myself with for improvisation on stage rather than composing a concrete ‘work of music’ per se. Harmony may be composed by tuning a zither to a certain complex chord, or tonal movement/rhythms may be programmed into a sequencer, but the structure in which these devices will occur is often sketched at best.
This style of musical operation is deeply rooted in the study of La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and John Cage above all. In my final year of my undergraduate degree I completed a project study exploring the work of these artists in which I conducted artistic research experiments and completed an EP. This experience exposed me to the foundational influence of Zen Buddhist and Hindu perspectives on early experimentalist and minimal movements, largely originating from the works of Lao Tzu and Sri Ramakrishna respectively, which underpin the composers’ and consequently my musical ideology.
La Monte Young’s Indian raga inspired adoption of musical stasis as a technique to reveal sonic subtleties (such as overtones) over long periods of time is the driving force behind my use of drones and duration, while his adoption of just temperaments has began my interest in alternate tunings and the harmonic series. If timbre is to truly be explored in a state of deep listening, duration and justly tuned intervals are key. On stage, Pauline Oliveros’s thought and work forms the bedrock of my performance philosophy. Oliveros frames performance as firstly a listening practice from which meditative, intuitive and responsive playing may be achieved. Also passionate about the captivating nature of musical stasis, her seminal composition ‘Deep Listening’ is a remarkable demonstration of the concept and one that I’ve found wildly influential. As for Cage, the influence is almost purely conceptual. Cage’s explorations of eastern musical perspectives widens Oliveros’s listening foundations to include all of the sounds and space you may find yourself in; detailing a performance practice in which the performer attains a quietened mind and is sensitive to all sounds, allowing them to inform the playing. This includes sounds created by the performer themselves. Constructing music in response to an environment is what pushed me initially to begin musical exercises with field recordings, channelling Sri Ramakrishna’s suggestion that music should never interrupt the environment, only decorate it.
La Monte Young’s iconic 1964 minimal piece ‘The Tortoise, His Dream and Journeys’ which explore stasis and overtones.
In light of these influences, conceptual and musical, I hope that my compositional goals make sense. I aim to create long form, textural music that uses stasis and duration to encourage deep listening experiences through which subtle changes in timbre might be magnified. To achieve this, I often employ consonant harmony, rhythmic phasing, extended canons, drones, just intonation and field recordings as musical devices, as well as meditation, deep listening, responsive playing and improvisation as performance techniques.
“To reach the state of no-thought means to reach the realm of creativity. The enlightened individual’s reflection is filled with the creative spirit that animates all things. (His or her activity) cannot be artificial. It is a pure, immediate reflection of ultimate reality. We call it the process of creativity.” Chan Chung-Yuan
The System has proven an inspiring avenue through which to explore these musical goals for a number of reasons. Primarily, the system is well suited to a slow, embodied experience of sonic subtlety, as any movement of the body will result in some form of subtle timbral change and is best heard when moving with care. Additionally, the machine learning processes employed allow most movement/sound relationships to be unpredictable, placing real importance on listening as an essential element of performing the system. Acting, listening and reacting is the fundamental process of using the system, making it incredibly fit for meditative improvisation in the style of Oliveros. In this framework for performance, we also find the tenets of interactivity. Interaction is not action or reaction, but a feedback cycle in which the user determines behaviour of the system, reacts to that behaviour, then the system changes in response and so on. Here we find the interesting parallel between experimentalist performance philosophy and human-computer interaction on which my projects and broader aims are situated.
This style of design is where I have arrived through the unique combination of my musical sensibilities and the affordances of the technology employed. Perhaps, under another designer, the system may have resulted in embodied control of melody, harmony and rhythm, however I believe that control of traditional musical devices is less suited and more difficult to implement in a movement interaction system with unpredictability and latent mappings baked-in. For music, we have the keyboard. For sound, the possibilities are endless.
Development
Now, to move on to findings from the latest session. Back in a larger room with a projection screen, a test using the full range of the Kinect along with visuals at scale was possible. Beginning in the larger room, I first conducted an experiment comparing new examples recorded throughout the new space with simply using the examples recorded in my limited space at home. Surprisingly, the examples recorded at home felt just as engaging if not more so. Wekinator’s extrapolating of data as the body moved into areas without examples resulted in smoother output, while examples recorded throughout the room caused jumps as the body arrived at the recorded example. This suggests that examples may be best kept at a minimum at the outset, with specific pose/sound relationships recorded where a predictable outcome is desired. Where more range was desired, or new models needed new examples recorded, the ‘randomize’ function once again proved a very effective solution to quickly record interesting pose/sound relationships. See below for an demonstration of the example recording process:
In the visual realm and contrary to my predictions last week, 1:1 mappings within the interactive particle visual did not provide a more engaging user experience. Predictability was nullified by dissonance with the unpredictable sonic control. Instead, I found that latent values assigned to particle system parameters generate a unique user experience in which the movement of the particles may inspire movements of the body, hence creating bodily awareness and encouraging a wider degree of movement experimentation. This deepens the interaction between the system and the user, as the user is not only acting but reacting to both the visual and sonic material. As the changes in behaviour of the visual system mirror those in the music system, the experience becomes one of interactive audiovisuality. A rudimentary and intuitive mapping of poses to sonic and visual parameters in tandem in Wekinator was enough for semantically congruent relationships to emerge between the two mediums during system use, making for an audiovisually cohesive experience.
This session also included further enquiry into how automatically controlled parameters are best divided from those manually controlled by the body. I found that parameters concerned with musical form and structure are best assigned to automatic sources, such as LFOs or a sequencer, to maintain coherent musical movement. In this session, the chord changes were conducted by a clocked LFO, while the bass line was performed by an algorithmic melody generator (Mutable Instruments: Marbles). The continually renewing cadences between the two devices provided sufficient musicality for the piece to gain momentum. Manual harmonic control was creatively included through linked and inverted filters on field recording samples being passed through the two resonators, with the Disting resonator’s chord being modulated by the LFO but the Spectral Multiband Resonator’s chord remaining static. This allowed me to shift between the two chords manually, introducing a second dimension of harmonic variation.
In the bass, the later stages of the session also explored manual control of Marbles’ ‘Spread’ parameter, which determines the range of potential notes the algorithm may provide. Subtle control of this parameter allowed slightly more variation in the bass line with movement throughout the room, however the note changes were so slow that the interaction was not apparent.
New models were recorded and assigned to control the mix, repeat and bend parameters of the QU-BIT Databender module, a digital beat-repeat like buffer effect. Passing a field recording of birds through this modulated effect provided an interesting and elegant sonic device and a new avenue for temporal interaction, as tension could be created through the gradual rising of the sample playback speed or pitch. This device is best used sparingly and deliberately as it becomes tiresome. In the example, this effect is turned on about halfway through.
Captivated by the interaction cycle between myself and the audiovisual system and propelled by the automatic musical movement, I could improvise for hours. Where there had been an exhaustion of movement ideas in previous sessions, the directions and velocities of movement suggested by the particle system provided ample influence to dive into new configurations and positions. Returning to ‘null’ points close to the ground where I had mapped low filter frequencies and sonic inactivity provided predictable sound environments to revisit, then deep attentive listening encouraged using slow movements to emerge from these low, small poses. These movement sequences in particular were engaging and inspiring devices, providing a timbral crescendo structure as higher frequencies and more sonic activity was revealed as the body expanded and grew. Additionally, travelling from one corner of the room to another outlined potential structure, as one consistent timbral change was able to underlay the more sporadic ones provided by movement of the limbs throughout the travel. Between these structural devices and the captivating nature of the improvisation, building blocks of a cohesive performance can be found.
Physicality
Despite the positively captivating user experience, reviewing the footage from this session highlights one issue underlying the system. By incorporating human body movement, performance of the system invariably includes choreography. Choreography can certainly be a captivating spectacle, however when performed by someone untrained in the specifics of the art form the body may deteriorate the performance as a whole. Viewing the recording, my movements are neither impressive nor captivating - nor were they meant to be, mind you. In this tension however is the issue, that by including movement interaction in the performance practice, movement is now also a performative practice. This is an unforeseen problem that requires a solution - perhaps revisiting the use of acoustic instruments to contextualise the movement is one? Perhaps I / the performer requires choreographic consultation? One solution suggested by previous experimentation is visual body representation, which when conducted creatively bolsters the presence of movement. I found this to be the case in the particle demonstration from last week.
Most significantly however, I think this phenomenon supports one of the most emergent findings: that the system is most suited to cases in which a dancer provides movement and the designer provides musical and visual cues, as is the case in my sessions with Lauren.
Structure
Following this session, my supervisors pushed me to articulate what form a composed performance with the system could take within a definitive duration. Though I met this with reluctance at first, further consideration has provided a lucid idea based on La Monte Young’s ‘Compositions 1960’ series. This series is defined by incredibly minimal, often non-musical directions for a performance, the most popular of which being #7 of which the sole direction is to hold B3 and F#4 for “a long time.” Informed by discoveries from the session, my composition could begin with the basis:
“Begin as an egg, hatch, and listen to the new world around you. Moving slowly, fly to the opposite corner of the room”
This minimal style of direction insinuates exploration and discovery, as the performer will be forced to interact with the system, attentively responding to the sonic repercussions of their movements. The narrative included in this idea could also inform pre-composed, automatically controlled uses of melody and harmony, over which the performer would maintain timbral autonomy. The particle visuals are dissonant with this concept however, perhaps it should be re-framed to ‘space-egg’ or ‘planet’ or ‘self aware atom’.
