Good fellows, forgive me. While my goal is not journalistic
excellence, I perhaps let my imagination and hopes as expressed in the last
post supersede reasonable expectations of a conference. And, having neglected to do my homework
on it (and leaving aside those other minor factual errors that I’m too lazy to
correct) missed the one sadly relevant thing this conference shares with many
others: it’s really expensive.
Therefore, no conference for me.
But the evening concerts are cheap, so I
went to the concert last night at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater and have much
to say about it. Unfortunately,
the experience tempered my previous enthusiasm quite a bit. But, contrarian as I am, my new
favorite emotion is ambivalence. Let
me talk it out through the descriptions and critiques of the night’s works.
Floating
Points II – Matthias Schneiderbanger, Michael Vierling
This work is what they called a
“collaborative performance” of two performers, one enclosed by a Sensor-table
and the other gloved in a Chirotron, both uniquely created instruments, of a
kind. The Sensor-table is a table
with upward-pointing sensors that detects object ranges, here the hands of the
performer, and the object motions are then translated through a computer into
sound. (I assume the principle is
the same as in this sensor LED table below).
It appeared that each sensor corresponded
to a different suite of synthesized sounds, of booms, crashes, metallic
jingling, that the performer commanded all around his body. A direct downward
fall of the hand resulted in a percussive activation with decay, a hovering
hand a sustain, and most interestingly, an upward pinch, as if gingerly
plucking grains of sand from a beach to let them fall, sucked the sound away
like a percussive strike reversed.
I am not sure whether the flat area of hand-object had any relation to
the sound created.
The Chirotron is a glove that very
literally the direction the sound from the Sensor-table comes from. Wherever the operator pointed, the
sound would appear from the speakers in that area of the room, surround-sound
to the max. The performance
involved both of those, and the Chirotron’s performer would sweep his hand
across the room and the sound would travel as well, but of course without the
Doppler effect of an actual traveling sound-producing object. The Chirotron is a neat analogue to the
conductor, who points to a part of the orchestra to get that section to
respond. However, in this case
it’s the actual performance environment that responds and not the activation of
the instrument itself.
Floating
Points II demonstrated a
fun kind of manipulation; still, together the Sensor-table and Chirotron
represent an evidently persistently capturing idea of playing through
gesticulation and body movement without any actual physical contact that is
still, well, kind of old. I mean,
remember the Theremin? That was an
instrument of essentially translating gesticulation through a magnetic field
while this is infrared. The medium
is different, the concept the same.
And the analogue of a conductor mentioned before is evident, although
what is new is the idea of conducting of electronic sound live.
As a performance, while the Chiro-tron
showed a very literal and concrete role to play, it was very difficult to
understand what control the Sensor-table’s performer held. The raw classes of sounds apparently
were synthesized pre-performance, and the performer’s job was to activate them
(that’s a word I’m going to use a lot – activate) but with very little real
control. There appeared no ability
to manage pitch, just the timing of strike and decay. The appearance of a many wires and a Macbook showed that the
origin of the sounds themselves came
from elsewhere, and even in performance the performer seemed disconnected in
more than one way from the actual making of music. It didn’t help very much that the sounds they chose to
perform were ugly and the composition itself had nothing like structure, much
less architecture, to it. While an
interesting a demonstration of technology, it does not work so much as an
effective medium for music yet.
Still, I must give much credit to a very
effective demonstrating of how manipulation of sound direction and performance
space vastly changes how we could experience performances, if only they were
composed to make advantages of sound origins than the stage just in front
you.
Oh wait, that’s also an old idea, dating
back to the Italian Renaissance and the era of Ars Nova, where cathedral acoustics
and balconies were exploited to have separate sections of performers that would
have call-and-response concertos from across the rooms and thus a directional
perfomance.
You can watch a performance of Floating Points below and judge for
yourself.
Violent
Dreams – Hans Leeuw, Diemo Schwarz
Uh oh. Another Macbook.
I have a feeling that the most used musical instrument here is going to
be a computer.
Double uh oh. The word “improvisation” in the program. It’s going to be a long night.
The electrumpet, performed by Hans,
appears to have two mouthpieces and two functions, one as a trumpet making
acoustic trumpet sounds, and with the other attached set of buttons an
instrument that senses the column of air produced and translates that into
electric signals. While making
many ugly noises, as a concept it is still interesting that it seems that some
physical elemenets of the original physical vibrating column of air are still
retained in the electronic interpretation, and it’s not just a matter of
button-pressing.
The other “instrument” suite was an array
of tablets and programming called CataRT which Diemo operated by touch, again
appearing to really be controlling the initiation and manipulation of sounds
pre-recorded on that damn Macbook.
As would make sense, taps produced percussiveness, swipes of the finger
across trackpads produced swipes of sound, etc. Here, through his iPad-like device we evidently see now the
introduction of the accelerometer; instead of operating by touching the pad or
by the pad sensing movement of the performer, the pad manipulated sounds by
translating its own movement.
Sometimes this did produce analogous imitations of manipulations. Jiggling the pad wavered the noises, shifting
it one way shifted the timbre, shifting it the other did something else, like
he was playing tilt ball in secret.
More on accelerometer use in the next performance.
Yet, and this will be a persistent
problem throughout, the performance was not of a musical piece but a
demonstration of musical instruments, and an improvisation of displeasing
noises played on two seemingly ridiculously complicated new instruments was
hardly an endorsement of their potential to play controlled, composed
music. What would the sheet score
look like for CataRT, for instance?
Probably like a cheat-code for Mortal Combat. Up-up-down-left-A-down-B-B-Up, and then destroy your
audience by ripping their spines out.
Again, you can check out a similar
performance below.
4
Hands iPhone – Atau Tanaka, Adam Parkinson
Each of the two performers holds in each
hand an iPhone, again using them as the interface with which to manipulate
pre-recorded sounds. The main
medium here was motion, and now I get to talk about accelerometers. These sensors sense the force of
acceleration on its object in all directions, though I think people would
prefer to call them the axes x, y, and z.
The object set in motion or coming to a stop exerts forces in those axes,
which can then be translated as instructions to the sound to wiggle around,
crescendo, change timbre and such.
Set flat and still, gravity forms a baseline so that accelerating force
from gravity alone also sends a signal when the sensor is tilted, its pitch and
roll and the position of the object can be known and, again, translated as
instructions to the sound. I’m not
sure if the spatial position of the sensor has itself any effect, for instance
if the same motions 1ft off the ground produce the same sounds as 10ft off the
ground, but I don’t think it does.
In any case, the concept of being able to translate physical forces
experienced by an object – not inflicted on the object, like striking a string
or blowing into a tube – into signals is really cool. I feel it’s analogous to being able to hear physics, as if
(synesthetes know about this) color could be translated into taste, or light
into smell, or temperature into sound.
Oh, but wait. Where have I seen this tech before?
Sigh. Yet again the performance itself
was not a ringing endorsement of the technology, and the technology not a
ringing endorsement of its creator’s attunement with pop culture. First, there are enormous complications
of performance. The motions of the
performers don’t always translate reliably, so, again, the performer often
looks disconnected from the sounds produced by his device. Then, in this case, any motion at all
is a signal, even if unintended, so the performer is limited to very delicate
and cautious motions. No fiery
performance here. (Of course,
there could be a computer program, or say, a console and software, maybe call
it Nintendo, which can determine the acceptable range of motions and sounds in
any instance.) And also, because
the performer only has so much space and ability, the accelerometers are
confined foremost by the performer’s own range of motion and movements. What happens if you want to accelerate
upwards but are already holding the device above your head? You have to move downwards first even
if you don’t want to. Really, the
performance space is the reachable sphere around the performer and good old
physical ability. In this case,
then, it seems really ironic to see such a massive amount of computing power in
ones hands and then limit it to such a cumbersome and circumscribing and clumsy
method of having to handle it.
Plus, and the pre-recorded sounds they
were manipulating were, once again, at dangerous volumes and deadly horrifying
to listen to.
Aphasia
– Mark Applebaum
I’ll leave you with this. It’s a piece of performance art, this
one, and does not actually demonstrate live creation of sound. Mark performs his own gesticulations, a
sign-language of sorts, in-time with a recording of vocal chop-suey. I think it
shows the sort of control music engineers wish to aspire to with gesticulated
performance that has not nearly yet been achieved with previous efforts.
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