PerfTech Presents: InterMEDIA Performance 2011

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PerfTech students presented intermedia performances in TAMU’s Fallout Theatre.

Professor Morris led his students in devising a performance titled Soccer Mom, which played on giallo horror film, using everyday experiences to generate a chilling musical score and sound effects. Students made sounds by preparing dinner (spaghetti and a cocktail for dad), using a power drill, and a Nintendo Wii Remote embedded in a soccer ball. Offstage performers controlled the processing of the video footage and chose pitches to be played each time our “boy” on stage hit the soccer ball. Other students contributed by preparing the vintage lo-fi looking projections.

Another notable performance was Black Hole for audio and video feedback. One student’s instrument was a microphone running through guitar effects pedals and a guitar amp, and the other student performed with a video camera focused on the projected image from its output, in addition to various light sources. The result was a surprisingly rich and organic performance.

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Tappatappatappa

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This performance was created by the composer improvising with custom software and by tapping on a microphone.

It uses a generative performance environment I named after Einstein’s paper introducing the special theory of relativity Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies). Normally, the software performs with an acoustic performer by capturing and transforming sounds from the soloist.

In contrast, in Tappatappatappa, I feed the audio output to its own input. In a sense, the sound emerges from no source, as if from nothing. The audio output, you see, is never perfectly silent: ambient noise in the room, small irregularities, or electrical interference  introduced by the analog electronics create the material from which rich and varied material can bloom, like a pearl forms around a grain of sand. In this way, the feedback performance, which I call Tappatappatappa (its musical result is a distinct work deserving a different name), erodes the human element in performance and allows the technology to find its own voice, which I only coax in one direction or another by tapping, scraping, or moving the microphone within the performance space. In performances of Tappatappatappa, certain resonances emerge that are unique to the room and the moment, some physical positions in space produce certain sonic responses so reliably that the space is almost tangibly marked by its sonic response to my moving the microphone through the space.

 

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StillMotion

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All source sounds have been recorded during an average day in the lives of different people. In performance, the sound clips are fractured, so that the treble, middle, and bass frequencies of the sound act as three facets of a flexible beat pattern that articulates time. As they are played, the sounds travel toward, past, and away from the observer independently, causing their speed and pitch to be warped in time and space. The result is a texture of fragmented scenes, woven together, from multiple and mobile points of view in time and space, presenting the sound events as ephemeral strands of instants in time. StillMotion explores the ordinary sublime: on the one hand the impossibility of recording the everyday (as soon as it is marked, it is “elevated” in some way), and the impossibility of recording a performance (as soon as it is recorded it is a frozen text).

StillMotion was originally created for a collaboration with guest choreographers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner, and the dance and visual arts departments of Texas Woman’s University. Photographs and sounds were taken of the dancers acting out an average day in their lives. The photos were used as a basis for the choreography, and the music, choreography and set design grew together organically. The performance (January 31, 2004) consisted of dance depicting functions or feelings captured in the photos, stylized versions of photos on scrims hanging within space (sometimes invading the dance space), and this music, from processed sounds of the “average day.”

This piece exists in the form of a custom software application. It may be run over a long time span as an aural installation, over a short time as a concert piece for improvising electronics, or from fixed media as a concert piece. Although carefully composed, the aleatoric elements of the piece ensure a unique performance each time.

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Harmonies (They Spin)

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openingThe title is an anagram of “Riemann Hypothesis,” one of seven mathematical mysteries that are part of the Millennium Problem challenge (offering a $1 million prize for a solution). It suggests that there is an underlying order to the distribution of prime numbers, which otherwise seems to be unpredictable.

In a similar spirit, “Harmonies (They Spin)” conjectures an underlying order to the seemingly ungraspable or unreconcilable. The counterpoint of sound and image presents an interaction between the attainable and the elusive, the harmonious and the dissonant. Binary oppositions are established, including noisy versus pitched timbres and regular pulses versus freely sweeping gestures, to explore the stable and unstable qualities of each when juxtaposed in various ways, approaching or diverging from a common center.

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Folding: Imitative Counterpoint in Improvisation through Live Sampling

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Picture 1Folding is a study in using live sampling as an extension of the classic technique of imitative counterpoint. The title refers to the molecular folding of proteins and other molecules: atoms link together at angles and fold over themselves as they form the molecule, and the resulting shape affects the function of the chemical. Similarly, the voice of an improvising soloist is folded onto itself live to build a musical form.

The work is a hybrid between composition and instrument. The software is equipped to make decisions at a small level on its own, in order to maintain interest without requiring constant intervention by the performer, but it relies on the performer to initiate changes from one state to another. The software uses delay lines and pitch shifters to turn the soloist into a quintet.

The six states of the software’s behavior dictate the approximate delay settings for each voice:

  1. Now (acting as a harmonizer, or in homophony),
  2. Near (within the last few seconds, an echo or stretto ),
  3. Then (recalling a previous timepoint specified during the performance),
  4. Same (recalling a randomly-chosen timepoint from earlier in the performance),
  5. Different (each of the four delay lines go to different points in the delay line, exploring and recombining moments from the past, which may be used as a developmental or transitional section), and
  6. Early (recalling the first material played in the performance, or a recapitulation).

The solo instrumental performer is able to choose the behavior of the software (as one of these states) and how to play in relation to them, for example he or she may play the same material, so all recapitulate the opening material or may play a new countermelody to it. In some performances, performers have enjoyed having me or another computer attendant direct the software as they respond to their past selves, recontextualized in performance through the software.

Performance with Jayson Beaster-Jones, tenor saxophone (MP3)

Performance with Eric km Clark, violin

This work also has a distinct voice when used in a feedback system, when it hears only its own output. Compare this with “Tappatappatappa.” “Folding” with feedback:

To run the software:

  1. Download and install the free Max runtime for your operating system (Mac OS or Windows): click here
  2. Download the performance software (ZIP), unzip it, and open it with the Max runtime.

For solo performance, I can adapt the controls to your MIDI or USB controller. Contact me to let me know what device you’d like to use in performance!

 

 

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Ontological Substance and Meaning in Live Electroacoustic Music

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In Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval: Genesis of Meaning in Sound and Music. Philosopher Stephen Davies has used the terms “ontologically thin” and “ontologically thick” to describe compositions with varying amounts of flexibility under interpretation. Placing these two poles on a continuum of ontological substance, I extend Davies’s ideas to shed light on issues concerning meaning in live electroacoustic music. I demonstrate that algorithmic and interactive elements lend an extra dimension to the existence of the musical work and that the apparent obsolescence of live performance

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