Abstract for Montreal Summit Conference
Title: On the Sound of Becoming: musical perturbations
Keywords: music composition, improvisation, sound art, self-organizing systems, emer-gence, interactivity, perturbation
Abstract: Emergence is a fundamental aspect of contemporary digital art works, and can arise from a variety of sources, "ordering itself from a multiplicity of chaotic interactions." (Ascott, 1993) It is also essential to various forms and modes in musical praxis. Ex-perimental, Improvisatory, and Generative music exhibit in their emergence a becom-ing. In each genre, the simple rules or relationships that form a composition act to-gether and lead to unexpected, unpredictable, and novel results. Musical gestures show a ripple of cohesion, take ephemeral form, and then dissolve.
Often the experience of this process requires a great investment of attention and time on the part of the listener. Time is especially significant in Generative music, where the intentions are not to produce an immediate effect or shock of perception, but a gradual transformation, as sounds are heard in the ebb and flow of a generative proc-ess. This transformation—or becoming—is resonant with the emergence experienced in a telematic environment, or with interactive art or media.
This paper investigates environments of music and digital interaction, and discusses how the tension between interactive control and generative autonomy can redefine an interaction as a perturbation. In this context a perturbation does not assume the clear cause-effect nature of a musical instrument (press a key to hear a note, for example). Instead, it allows interactions to manifest as sound, gradually following the course of a composition's generative process. Perturbations introduce new sounds into a composi-tion's aural palette and can subtly reshape the musical character of a work. User choices are acknowledged within a system, but are subject to the dynamics of that system before they can become manifest.
This abstract was submitted for the First Summit Meeting of the Planetary Collegium, Montreal, CANADA, 19-22 April 2007. See http://summit.planetary-collegium.net for conference details.
Keywords: music composition, improvisation, sound art, self-organizing systems, emer-gence, interactivity, perturbation
Abstract: Emergence is a fundamental aspect of contemporary digital art works, and can arise from a variety of sources, "ordering itself from a multiplicity of chaotic interactions." (Ascott, 1993) It is also essential to various forms and modes in musical praxis. Ex-perimental, Improvisatory, and Generative music exhibit in their emergence a becom-ing. In each genre, the simple rules or relationships that form a composition act to-gether and lead to unexpected, unpredictable, and novel results. Musical gestures show a ripple of cohesion, take ephemeral form, and then dissolve.
Often the experience of this process requires a great investment of attention and time on the part of the listener. Time is especially significant in Generative music, where the intentions are not to produce an immediate effect or shock of perception, but a gradual transformation, as sounds are heard in the ebb and flow of a generative proc-ess. This transformation—or becoming—is resonant with the emergence experienced in a telematic environment, or with interactive art or media.
This paper investigates environments of music and digital interaction, and discusses how the tension between interactive control and generative autonomy can redefine an interaction as a perturbation. In this context a perturbation does not assume the clear cause-effect nature of a musical instrument (press a key to hear a note, for example). Instead, it allows interactions to manifest as sound, gradually following the course of a composition's generative process. Perturbations introduce new sounds into a composi-tion's aural palette and can subtly reshape the musical character of a work. User choices are acknowledged within a system, but are subject to the dynamics of that system before they can become manifest.
This abstract was submitted for the First Summit Meeting of the Planetary Collegium, Montreal, CANADA, 19-22 April 2007. See http://summit.planetary-collegium.net for conference details.
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