jwilzewske: electroacoustic

Showing posts with label electroacoustic. Show all posts

Sunday, February 12, 2012

John Bischoff: Audio Combine, Modal/Bispectral Discoveries, Post-Human Futures

L ocal color’ features synthetic bell-like tones, sustained tonal clusters, and computer-triggered acoustic bells struck in complementary patterns that are sometimes random, sometimes human-triggered, and combinations of both... It is enough to reference the idea of a tactus, but not enough to be [understood as] an organizing [meaning-generating/insuring] element.”
— Audio Combine, liner notes, Ed Osborn, Brown Univ, 2011.

T he music comprising John Bischoff’s new CD ‘Audio Combine’, just released on New World Records, is beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable. Philip Perkins’s engineering and production values are superb.

T he five tracks on the disc are diverse, representing Bischoff compositions from 2004 to mid-2011. The third track ‘Local Color’ evokes traditional chinese zhong bells, but also especially calls into question the ‘who’ of music performance [in asmuch as some of the bells are computer-triggered, randomly and deterministically, while others are played by Bischoff from his score] and other limits of performance identity [insofar as the bell modes and timbres evolve after the bell is struck—on the rim; on the bosses/nipples; on the wall; etc.—in aleatoric/random ways that the musician-computer can neither predict nor control]. Of course, all music emerges in less-than-predictable/controllable ways—just less obviously so than bells.

[50-sec clip, John Bischoff, ‘Local Color’; (track 3), 2012, 1.4MB MP3]

T he pieces were all recorded in live performance with minimal editing and no over-dubs. Philip Perkins recorded direct from Bischoff’s setup and also from three pairs of microphones placed at various points in the concert hall. The mix heard here switches between these four perspectives as the pieces are played. The distance and pace incorporated into the recordings from various mic positions give a clear sense of the space of the performance, and of the object-ness of the sounds. That space and our place within it become the final part of the ‘material’: when the listener has no fixed point of perspective, then the position from which the listening/understanding is done becomes one of the elements of counterpoint.”
— Audio Combine, liner notes, Ed Osborn, Brown Univ, 2011.

T here are a few excellent books that empirically measure the modal vibrations of bells... He & Fu, for example. And some books on bispectral analysis—mainly used today in aerospace engineering and vibration-management engineering of turbines and other structures. Useful to explore if you are a composer/performer wanting to know more about how to more reliably utilize distinctive bell harmonics in your work. Links to some of these at the bottom of this post.

[Modal Analysis, Fu & He, 2001, p. 276]

[50-sec clip, Wang Yuanping & Hubei Chime Bells Orchestra, ‘竹枝词 (Zhu-zhi-ci) Bamboo-pole Love Poem’; (track 1), 1989, 1.5MB MP3]

T he substantial rhythmic independence of the parts in the ‘Local Color’ bell quartet is part of its distinctive Asian beauty. Because each bell projects its sound clearly, each individual bell can easily be heard over the rest of the bell ensemble, and yet the ensemble—the ‘community’ of bells—remains the primary subject. This is dissimilar from other voiced percussion like a timpani choir, performing a ‘programmatic’ role, where the effect of four or more timpani playing together is treated more as an ‘effect’ than as harmony. It is instead quartet ‘orchestration with Chinese characteristics’!

W ith computer-triggered sticking, the timing of the ring-down and the pitch-bend are the same, but the kinematic nuances of human left-hand/right-hand mallet or sticking patterns are gone. But the electromechanical linear actuators for the computer-controlled bells have their own kinematic constraints, in terms of speed of resetting for the next stroke, and so on. They have their own unique, finite kind of ‘embodiment’ just as we humans have ours, and we can hear this in these wonderful Bischoff compositions and this excellent recording of them being performed ‘live’.

A nd so the most amazing thing that we get from Bischoff’s mechatronic compositions like ‘Local Color’ is a vivid glimpse of robotic humanity and machine consciousness, revealed by the beater mechanics and linear actuators... something like an inversion of the ‘human-becoming-machine’ perspective of Ambrazevičius and Balsienė (link below): ‘machine-becoming-human’... a brilliant future of new expressive possibilities, including bionic accomodations for musicians with disabilities. Musical prosthetics? Sonnez les matines! / Din, dan, don!

J ohn Bischoff (b. 1949) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his seminal work in computer network ensembles. Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, and Robert Ashley. He has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 year as a composer, performer, teacher, and grassroots activist. His performances around the US include NEW MUSIC AMERICA festivals in 1981 (SF) and 1989 (NYC), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Roulette Intermedium (NYC), and the Beyond Music Festival (LA). He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künst in Berlin, Fylkingen in Stockholm, and TUBE in Munich. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world's first Computer Network Band, and he co-authored an article on the League's music that appears in "Foundations of Computer Music" (MIT Press 1985). He was also a founding member of the network band The Hub with whom he performed and recorded from 1985 to 1996.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Cheryl Melfi: Digital Reeds Extraordinaire!

S pace is social, and each society produces its own space—space that is simultaneously mental and physical. Space is always ‘produced’, in the sense that it is always a set of relationships; it is never a ‘given’; never inert or transparent; never in a state of nature untouched by culture. There is no such thing as an ‘empty’ space. You have already filled it...”
— David Wiles, p. 10.

I n electroacoustic music the interrelationship of spatial attributes and spatial schemata is often engaged in a play of perceptual grouping—one that blurs and confounds distinctions like ‘source’ and ‘ensemble’.”
— Gary Kendall & Mauricio Ardila, p. 125.

T he solo electroacoustic clarinet performance by Cheryl Melfi last night in CharlotteStreet.org’s City Center Square location was excellent. Apart from the beauty of the works, the program illuminated a number of aspects of electroacoustic performance practice—things that are more apparent when it is soloist-plus-electronics, as contrasted with larger-ensemble-plus-electronics.

Mark Snyder: ‘Butterfly’
Richard Johnson: ‘Hiram’ (première)
Alex Harker: ‘Fluence’
Daniel Eichenbaum: ‘The Lonely Road’ (première)
João Pedro Oliveira: ‘Time Spell’

T hese are all works for amplified B-flat clarinet and electronics. By their nature (with the performer positioned center-stage in a multi-loudspeaker array configuration) the works explore the relationship between ‘enacted’ space (a space whose semantics are created through the presence of the clarinettist on stage), the composed space of the “tape” (electronics) part and the bridge between the two created by live processing (typically in Max/MSP or Pd or other software tool). The clarinet part calls for extremes in register and dynamic range, with extremely animated playing. Each of the compositions draws on sonic causal relationships that we perceive as interactive, but which are in reality generated through careful synchronization with the electronics part. In some of the pieces, by using ‘clarinet-triggered’ causal relationships and gestural interplay (notably in the Oliveira piece) as an alternative to continuous realtime processing, the electronic material becomes more strongly linked—spatially and narratively—to the live instrument.

T he unique potential of electroacoustic music to explore spatial relationships and our auditory perceptions and cognition of the body’s spatial situatedness has raised issues about appropriate performance practices for this music. Throughout the course of its evolution, electroacoustic music has invited research into new modes of performance. Spatial details are invariably a consideration in these.

T he unique potential of electroacoustic music to explore timbral relationships and our perceptions is also invariably revealed... so long as the performer is up to the challenge! Clarinettists are today challenged by innovations in both contemporary music and technology. Compositions for clarinet in recent decades have led to performance practices that include new techniques, such as frulato, multiphonics, glissandos, extreme alternate fingerings, reed-jacking, microtonal pitch-bending, key-clicks, lip-buzzing, and vocal sounds such as humming or singing at the same time the instrument is blown. These techniques are increasingly permeating the repertoire of the clarinet, especially so in the case of film scores. They require the clarinettist to constantly extend her/his technique, both blowing and fingering.

N otably, Rehfeldt recommends the amenability of the clarinet to experiments in new music: “Its flexibility allows a wide range of effects, including all manner of multiple sonorities, microtones, tone, trills, air sounds, percussive sounds” (see also Druhun, 2003).

C larinet and electronics mingle and exchange places. The identities/characters of each, though, remain discernable. An explosive staccato articulation is a ‘Bartokian’ act clearly in an instrumental idiom, while longer note values, with long dynamics changes and circular breathing to sustain them, manifest an overtly ‘vocal’, visceral, diaphragmatic aspect. Cheryl negotiates some superhuman clarinet feats—virtuosic technic [extreme technic] with appealing musicality!

M ono samples were used to dramatic effect in several of the works, panning the samples across the Mackie speaker array. This was most notably the case with the sounds of extended releases of breath through the clarinet, which present spectromophologies that ‘accept’ the spatialization attributes of panning across the area of the Mackie monitors. [Smalley emphasizes that “the motion must be implicit in the sound itself, or the texture itself, or the context itself.” Basically, the use of 5.1 spatialization (as opposed to 8-channel or other formats) magnifies the perceived kinetic energy of material. Small gestural fragments are scattered over the 5.1 array to form “cumulative” trajectories of sound, and the listener becomes immersed in dark and abstract soundscapes generated by the clarinet.] By layering materials a rich spatial hierarchy is created: a World, a believable World. At any given moment, certain sounds/motions dominate others, and the hierarchy is in constant flux as materials emerge, develop, and recede. Cool! A World that is impervious to human mastery!

A number of processing techniques are utilized.

Buffering: This is used to extend textures established by the clarinet into more dynamic and irregular textures, building up a dense sound-world which clearly originates from the clarinettist on stage.
Delay Lines: Depending on the delay times, these either exaggerate short gestures through rapid and irregular repetition or, alternately, longer delay lines assist in the build-up of textures.
Freezing: This facilitates harmonic layering based on the clarinet’s note being artificially ‘held’ once it has moved on to another.
Granulation: This is frequently used to add fluctuating textures to sustained notes, often controlled via amplitude tracking (e.g., a louder sound will have a smaller grain size and greater grain variation).

C heryl Melfi has served as principal clarinetist in the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, the Catalina Chamber Orchestra, and the Michigan Pops Orchestra. She is a past member of Quadrivium, the Crosswinds Ensemble, the Arizona-based wind quintet Fünf, and the contemporary music quartet THUD. She has also performed with contemporary music groups including the Contemporary Directions Ensemble, the Prime Directive, and the Nova Chamber Players. With Quadrivium, she was a featured artist at the 2010 Electro-Acoustic Juke Joint and the 2011 Thailand International Composition Festival. Melfi has performed at the 2008 International Clarinet Association’s ClarinetFest where her performance was called “excellent and exotic.” Other festival performances include Electronic Music Midwest and SEAMUS.

Cheryl Melfi website
Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance (KCEMA) website
João Pedro Oliveira website
Richard Johnson website
Alex Harker website
Mark Snyder website
Daniel Eichenbaum website
Timothy Place’s Max/MSP objects
Timothy Place’s ‘8space’ Max/MSP spatializer plug-in
Max/MSP Granular Spatializer object at IRCAM
Max/MSP frequency-domain filter Spectral Spatializer object at IRCAM
Karlheinz Essl’s RTClib for Max/MSP
ppooll
IRCAM tools
IRCAM Spat and other tools at FluxHome.com
Batista C. Uma abordagem da música eletroacústica brasileira no final do séc. 20. Monografia de Especialização. Universidade Federal de Goiás, Escola de Música. Goiânia, 2001.
Druhan M. A performer guide to multimedia compositions for clarinet and visuals: A tutorial focusing on Works by Joel Chadabe, Merrill Ellis, William O. Smith, and Reynold Weidenaar. DMA Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2003.
Emmerson S. Living Electronic Music. Ashgate, 2007.
Heaton R. ‘The contemporary clarinet’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet, C. Lawson, ed. Cambridge Univ, 1995.
Kendall G, Cabrera A. Why things don’t work: What you need to know about spatial audio. Proc International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2011;1-4.
Kendall G, Ardila M. The artistic play of spatial organization: Spatial attributes, scene analysis and auditory spatial schemata. Proc International Computer Music Conf (ICMC) 2007;63-8.
Gary Kendall page at Queen's Univ Belfast
Moore A, Schmidt P, Dockwray R. A hermeneutics of spatialization for recorded song. twentieth-century music 2009;6:83-114.
Rehfeldt P. New Directions for Clarinet. Univ California, 1994.
Smalley D. Space-form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound 2007;12:35-58.
Wiles D. A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge Univ, 2003.
Young J. Reflections on sound image design in electroacoustic music. Organised Sound 2007;12:25-33.
Zampronha E. Notação, representação e comunicação. Um novo paradigma da escrituração musical. Fapesp. São Paulo, 2000.
Zvonar R. A history of spatial music. eContact! 2004;7(4)

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Jan Beran’s ‘Winter711’, fractional Brownian motifs, long-range interdependence

D reams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again. And this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
— Anaïs Nin.

A new year; an occasion for us to meditate on how our mutual feelings and actions—our own; those of friends and family members—are meaningfully intertwined over long stretches of time.

H ere’s an MP3 of Jan Beran (piano) and Christopher Raphael (oboe) performing Beran’s ‘Winter 711’. Beautiful and evocative of long-range interdependence/entanglement.

I f you’re interested, some of the mathematical underpinnings of the compositional method used to create ‘Winter 711’ can be found in the links below. Happy New Year!

I believe it is not possible to coordinate musical parts in a purely responsive manner. That is, a system that simply triggers its events on the detection of notes in the solo part will perform badly in most musical contexts. This is due, in part, to the inherent detection latency that is built into the problem which makes the responsive system perpetually late. Instead, Music++ schedules the accompaniment’s note times by continually predicting into the future based on what it has currently observed.”
— Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

J an says of ‘Winter711’ that he tried to avoid any familiar sense of musical flow. In other words Jan’s music doesn’t give the performer (and listener) the usual cues needed to rhythmically organize the music. While the music is sometimes highly rhythmic, many sections contain no recognizable steady pulse, nor clear points of emphasis whose times differ in simple ways, as in much mixed meter music. While I think these pieces are engaging on their own terms, they work as a wonderful showcase for the [sequencer] accompaniment system, since I doubt they could be played by an all-human ensemble.”
— Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

James Mobberley: Electroacoustic Excitation, Anodized/Bionic/Fleshly Hybrids

M y friend and colleague, Carter Enyeart, provided not only the idea behind the piece and its reason for being, but also the recorded sound material for the fixed media... [live cello plus recorded, digitally-processed] sculpted sounds from that same instrument.”
— James Mobberley, program notes.

T he Charlotte Street Foundation’s annual Generative Performing Artist Awards Celebration at the H&R Block ‘City Stage Theater’ in Kansas City’s Union Station last night was really excellent. I especially enjoyed the part of the program honoring UMKC Conservatory composition faculty member James Mobberley, featuring two of his compositions.

Mobberley – Alter Ego (2006) for cello and fixed media, Carter Enyeart (vc)
Mobberley – Icarus Wept (1994-97) for trumptet and fixed media, Keith Benjamin (trpt)

C onsummately beautiful DAW editing and engineering of the fixed media sound! The ‘immersive’ intensity was boosted by having the live performer positioned in between two powered monitors, less than 1 meter away. (Ordinarily, in electroacoustic performances the fixed media speakers are deployed around the periphery of the performance space, and the musician operating the mixing surface is typically located in the center or at the rear of the hall, the net effect of which is a sense of remoteness or detachedness of the fixed media from the live performers. By contrast, the close-range speaker config last night was ‘in-your-face’ proximity, tantamount to making the monitors into ensemble players sitting right the heck next to the human soloist.)

I f you are familiar with Benjamin’s and/or Enyeart’s playing, you know that neither of them ever lacks for intensity or conviction, even under ‘normal’ conditions. But these specific Mobberley pieces, plus the point-blank immersive set-up, plus the exuberant, celebratory buzz infusing the audience members and performers and Charlotte Street leadership in attendance—put the passion over the top... these factors all combined to make the sound totally cook, man!

H ave a listen to some previously-recorded sessions on the SoundCloud link below.

P .S.— Keith Benjamin uses a Bach 1-1/4 ‘B’ mouthpiece with a #24 backbore.

W as funded by the NEA, a U.S. federal agency; therefore, the original concept [for ‘Icarus Wept’], involving full frontal nudity, had to be abandoned... impromptu recording session and ‘brain-fry’ in which we came up not only with trumpet sounds of all kinds but also with the formula for a ‘partially androgynacious anodized serial copolymer,’ patent-pending... [digitized sounds including] Keith’s trumpet stand, swirling coins, laughter, and various expletives [see the Caleb Kelly MIT book, link below]... Icarus’s flight toward the sun and sudden realization of his [fatal] mistake... Three movement titles (Getting Waxed; Climbing the Blue Staircase; 11 Feet from the Sun) reflect themes of Icarus. However, the other two (Somebody Else’s Face; Strap on Your Lobster) have nothing to do with Icarus at all, or with weeping either, pretty much.”
— James Mobberley, program notes.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Kari Johnson & Robert Burke: ‘Unity’ Concert

M any things to be enthused about last night, regarding Kari Johnson’s and Robert Burke’s KCeMA performance at Unity Temple.

Christopher Biggs – The Ends of Histories (piano, electronics, and video, 10-min)
Peter Swendsen – Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is (instrumented bass drum and electronics, 8.5-min)
Jeff Herriott – Velvet Sink (piano and electronics, 13-min)
João Pedro Oliveira – Liquid Bars (vibraphone and electronics, 12-min)
Scott Blasco – Queen of Heaven (piano and electronics, 23-min)

C hristopher Biggs’s ‘The Ends of Histories’ for piano, digital video and audio represents ideas regarding how history must end—any history, all Histories—including religious ones, socio‐political ones, geological histories, all of them. A primary-color-heavy, apocalyptic video of watery scenes and splotches of color is displayed on a screen adjacent to pianist Kari Johnson. The high-contrast, posterized quality of the video’s color palette adds to the non-human, bichromatic wolf-vision, Terminator-vision, Predator-vision, insect-vision viewpoint of the camera/cameraperson. The piano part is full of sforzando emphases, a hyper-percussive quality that is meant to mate with the punctate, unforgiving synth and cosmically abject waveform-samples on the digital audio tracks. Ms. Johnson provided a spirited, empathetic reading, flawless.

T he materials represent the following conceptions of the end of history: (1) a polarized religious End Time whereby everyone either ascends into a Pleasant World or descends into Fire—a prophetic, spiritual, transcendent End that has appeared in many forms throughout history and is currently represented by the idea that there will be some kind of cataclysm at the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012; (2) a sociopolitical End in which capitalist democracy supplants all other ideologies...; and (3) ‘scientific’ Ends... mass-extinctions.”
— Christopher Biggs, composer.

P eter Swendsen’s ‘Nothing is not there and the Nothing that is’ for miked/instrumented bass drum and electronics draws its inspiration from violent forces of wind and weather. Forces of Nature are the architects of the sonic space and textures, and humans are compulsory respondents to natural events that are not of their choosing. The majority of the piece consists of canticle-like ‘verse-and-responsory’ segments, each about one minute in length. The human percussionist (Robert Burke) is entrained in Nature’s mesh (electronics, plus waveforms captured by mics—his own playing, digitally processed, delayed, pitch-bent, filtered, and replayed through monitors adjacent to him on-stage). The piece is written in such a way that the performer becomes progressively more mindful of the sonic consequences of each gesture, each mallet stroke, for what the future will become—and we in the audience experience this sense of the long-term impact that we have, on each other, on other species, and on the planet as a whole. Burke’s finesse with extended mallet techniques—including inducing aeroelastic drum-head vibrations with his hypothenar eminence and including wiping a stick fitted with a red silastic scrubber on the drum-head to evoke wild-animal growls and anguished roaring—were ‘Never-heard-anything-like-that-before!’ breathtaking.

A long the coast, this collision is a constant negotiation: the land and sea changing back and forth; the clouds that hover near the shoreline. In the interior, however, wind and weather do not negotiate.”
— Peter Swendsen, composer.

J oão Pedro Oliveira’s ‘Liquid Bars’ delivers sonic textures that marry live marimba/vibraphone with the electronically-processed signals from two large dynamic ribbon mics positioned at approximately mid-resonator-tube height on the left side and right side of the instrument. The electronically-processed sounds mutate spontaneously under software control, modulated by the mallet strikes. The increasingly complex polyphonies and polyrhythms are fascinating and unnerving—almost like interviewing a person whose acute psychiatric problems have landed the person in your Emergency Room in the wee hours of a Saturday night. The notion of ‘self’ is called into question, not only who the self or ‘selves’ are—the one(s) in front of you—but also whether the whole assumption that ‘who’ any of us are is stable and ascertainable is faulty. The composition has ketamine-like psychotropic properties. Gee, should FDA and DEA regulate this music as a Schedule II pharmaceutical? Powerful! Robert Burke’s 4-mallet technique is superb...

L et us imagine a Marimba who can produce sound... Let us imagine that the Performer and the Marimba would each have the possibility of dividing themselves into two or more instruments and performers—and imagine that all of these play against each other.”
— João Pedro Oliveira, composer.

J eff Herriott’s ‘Velvet Sink’ is a piece that explores the possibilities of the piano through both extended performance techniques and the use of digital audio. I worry that technical obsolescence tends to make works like these short-lived. Several works realized on the IRCAM’s realtime audio processor 4X, for example, can no longer be performed, because the equipment and operating-system become obsolete so fast and cannot readily be ‘refactored’ and ported to new configurations that can render the same effects as the old ones. There are maintenance problems even with well-structured software. Pieces for ‘tape’ survive: the process of recording will always be ported to more recent technologies, such as CDs, DVDs, and hard disks. Here, though, Herriott’s Max/MSP scripts and Peak and ProTools elements are fairly portable and are likely to withstand the technology changes of this decade and the next. Kari Johnson gives tactile, delicate treatments of the keyboard passages. Repetitive eighth-note patterns, very insistent, have undulating up-down microtonal bends applied to them, until the patterns feel like waves, a gentle-swell aquatic envelope—the sonic surface is a kind of ‘minimalism-built-out-of-complexity’, sort of oxymoronic jumbo-shrimp. Then she stands up, reaches into the piano and begins plucking strings with fingertips and fingernails; hammering piano strings with percussion mallets; modifying the placements of rubber erasers between strings, prepared-piano-style—at times music-box-like, at times chime-like.

S amples were recorded using both a baby grand and an out-of-tune piano-harp from a destroyed upright piano. Some of these sound snippets were then processed and patched to generate longer sound files that were, in turn, reconfigured with ProTools. Others, notably the plucked gestures in the third movement, sound in performance much as they did during the recording. Ultimately, a unique Max/MSP patch is used in performance to control the playback of the recorded material.”
— Jeff Herriott, composer.

S cott Blasco’s (b'79) Queen of Heaven, composed for Ms. Johnson and premiered last night, consists of five movements, each conceived as [a religious—] icon, concerning itself with a single idea, turning it over and over, meditating on it from different angles. ‘Queen of Heaven’ is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “a source of comfort and inspiration to Christians from the earliest years of their history,” in the composer’s words. Blasco’s composition, informed by his Master’s degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and degree in Composition and Music Theory from Calvin College, is a highly personal exegesis. The angels’ ‘greeting’ the Mother of God in the first movement conveys more of a confrontation—as in Awed and Struck Dumb—than a ‘greeting’. Sonority and terror appear linked in other of the movements as well, enough to cause most to have second-thoughts about the appeal of the Pearly Gates.

W hen I write music, I’m not writing it ‘for me’ per se. I see it as holding out an olive branch to my audience, and offering praise by mirroring the Creator.”
— Scott Blasco, composer.

K ari Johnson is a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory where she studies with John McIntyre. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Central Missouri, a master’s degree in Piano Performance from Bowling Green State University, and a master’s degree in Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Johnson has won or placed in competitions throughout the Midwest, including the MTNA Steinway Young Artist Competitions in Missouri and Illinois and the Venetia Hall Concerto Competition. An active performer of new music and chamber music, Ms. Johnson’s recent performances include collaborative concerts at the University of Central Missouri and Pittsburg State University, UMKC’s “Carter and Messiaen at 100” festival, and the CMS Great Plains Chapter 2009 Regional Conference. In the coming year she will perform at the 2010 UCM New Music Festival and the 2010 SEAMUS National Conference.

R obert Burke is also a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory. He has enjoyed an eclectic carrier performing, studying and teaching throughout Canada, The United States, Japan and Europe. He is originally from Alberta, Canada although for the last decade has hailed New Orleans as home. A strong advocate of new music, Mr. Burke has commissioned and performed countless solo percussion works in recital and held member ship in New Works Calgary, Syncronia (St. Louis) and Conundrum New Music Ensemble. He has also been a regular member of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, The Calgary Philharmonic and The Louisianna Philharmonic. As a drumset player, Mr. Burke has performed and toured with a remarkable number of recording artists in clubs and festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including Brian Lee, Johnny Sansone, Preston Hubbard, Frankie Ford, Cyril Neville, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Peter Nero, Marvin Hamlish, and Robert Goulet. He holds degrees from University of Alberta and the University of Calgary and has served on the faculty of the University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, the University of Missouri-Columbia and Central Methodist College.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Memory of the Future: Joan Grossman’s Video and David McIntire’s Music

H istory is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history’s bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and cognition—The Blackout—as a condition that plagues history, and is particularly problematic in an era of mass media, in which memory is increasingly disembodied and virtualized, undermined by [what might be called] a ‘Generalized Media Disorder’. Technologies of media and war are creating a condition in which the virtual world is displacing the ethical world. The Blackout is a space of memory and thinking that collapses with Catastrophe and falls into a stupor. Humanity has been nearly extinguished by the tremendous violence it has enacted, pushing philosophy, language and ethics to their limits.”
— BLACKOUT, jacket blurb.

A nd music can be both a political act and powerful antidote to the collapse of social memory and the erosion of community... the withdrawal into passive, vegetative isolation, each at home, continually surfing Netflix, surfing the web.

McIntire – ‘Revenants’ (electroacoustic recording, live percussion, 20-min)
McIntire & Grossman – ‘Singing Bowl’ (video, electroacoustic, live percussion, 47-min)

T he combination of the video imagery and the live and the electroacoustic music was imaginative and highly listenable and watchable. Joan Grossman’s video was elegant... with a simple beauty that leveraged symmetries across the vertical and/or horizontal axes in the center of the 8 x 6-meter projection screen in Epperson Auditorium. The video involved replication and reflection of imagery in kaleidoscope fashion, at times with superimposed additional imagery blended into the central part of the visual field.

U nlike certain computer music / media compositions where the composer-artists ‘try too hard’ or succumb to temptation and use too many of the diverse array of techniques and patches available to them (resulting in sensory overload for the audience, hindering our grasping a memorable meaning or narrative arc), McIntire and Grossman achieved a satisfying, deliciously cohesive, coherent effect.

P ercussionists Jennifer Wagner and Christopher Howard performed at percussion tables on the right- and left-hand sides of the auditorium, while the recorded electroacoustic tracks were played through Mackie SRS 450® powered monitors and SRS 1500® subwoofer at the front of house. Seated as I was front-and-center, the antiphonal bells and gongs and cymbals, and glass wine goblets bowed across their rims with violin bows, and hammered and brushed brass bowls, and Equilibrium® tuned-box slit-drums, and Daisy® BBs rolling on the underside of a tom-tom drum head—all of this was wonderfully ‘immersive’ with the house lights dimmed. Great sibilance of the live percussion sounds, creating a rich contrast to the electronically-filtered and distorted sampled-voice and other sound content in the digital-recording tracks. [The ‘live’ elements might be better still if yet another pair of percussionists were added, positioning them toward the rear of the auditorium/performancespace so that the entire audience could experience the intense immersive effects that we did at the front.]

T he electroacoustic recording and reproduction/sound-reinforcement EQ was expertly done by McIntire. Both of the pieces have a low-pitch ‘red-spectrum’ rumble—almost boilerroom-like, or intrauterine—that imparts a subtle but pervasive ‘interiority’ to the music, very chesty, very warm.

G etting the pre-recorded digital tracks to ‘sit’ well amongst live performers relies on the tracks having an even level, a congenial tonal and level balance, and the right reverberant ambience. McIntire does this superbly, gracefully executing minor adjustments at the workstation control-surface in response to moment-to-moment performance decisions made by Wagner and Howard. Compressor and gain automation settings were spot-on, so that the percussion sounds sat happily in-track, with none of the live percussion effects sounding too loud or too quiet or clashing with the pre-recorded sonic material and synthesizer tracks.

F or some of the voice content (e.g., DECtalk Hawking-esque recitations of NOAA National Weather Service Marine Forecasts; alpha-bravo-charlie...romeo-sierra-tango...zulu), McIntire adds density to the voice sample by upping the compression ratio to maybe around 6:1 or 8:1 and then adjusts the threshold to a couple of dB on average-level parts. This means quieter sections are left alone and anything louder is jumped-on hard, bringing it closer to the average level. The coherence or cohesiveness of these two compositions, each with its volume level and acoustic complexity ascending to a climax about two-thirds of the way through and then tapering to a quiet conclusion, is nicely enhanced by this approach.

M cIntire’s EQ and engineering are commendable as noted above, and he does not go overboard on special effects. His EQ cuts are made over quite narrow bands, and his boosting is gentle and wide. McIntire gently applies boosts in the 50-300Hz band to add warmth. He applies cuts in the 1 KHz band, to deemphasize nasal vocal sounds, and adds generous ‘presence’ with boosts between 4 KHz and 8 KHz. The magical sense of Nature and air and space involves a wide boost applied between 12 KHz and 20 KHz, and that was really beautiful up-front, seated in Row #1. With these two compositions that explore the interplay between Nature and Technology, between humankind and other species—between inanimate noisy things like water (sometimes seemingly talking to us, almost alive, almost human), and supposedly-sentient creatures (humans) who often act in hostile, destructive and uncaring ways as though they were inanimate—the musical and artistic success absolutely depends upon making these EQ choices right.

I n summary, a fantastic, powerful experience—beautifully composed, engineered, filmed, edited, and performed. Very happy!

T he ArtSounds series, of which the McIntire-Grossman ‘Memory of the Future’ program was a part, is co-sponsored by UMKC Conservatory and Kansas City Art Institute.

J oan Grossman is a Brooklyn, New York-based independent media artist and producer. Her work has been screened in more than 20 countries and won numerous awards. She is currently Visiting Professor in Film & Media Arts at UMKC. Grossman was formerly a producer for NPR and Voice of America on a variety of programs, including All Things Considered, Afropop Worldwide, Kids America, and The Territory of Art. She has worked in Africa, China, Russia, and throughout Europe, has produced media for public interest organizations and NGOs, and has also worked as producer on European documentaries and feature films. Joan has a Ph.D. in Media and Philosophy from the European Graduate School and has taught film production and theory. She has worked with leading theorists and filmmakers such as Agnes Varda, Claude Lanzmann, Chantal Akerman, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. Her book, ‘Blackout: On Memory & Catastrophe’, was published in 2009 (link below).

D avid McIntire is a Kansas City, Missouri-based composer who, with composer-musicologist Kyle Gann, co-directed the 2009 Second International Conference on Minimalist Music at UMKC Conservatory. In 2010, he launched Irritable Hedgehog Music, a record label focusing on minimalist and soundscape compositions. McIntire has performed with Colorblind James Experience. With pianist R. Andrew Lee he has produced a recording of Tom Johnson’s ‘Hour for Piano’ (link below).

Saturday, December 4, 2010

|| Eye Candy + Ear Candy || ≤ || Eye Candy || + || Ear Candy ||

Burtner’s ‘A’aa’, Grace Lai, flute, and Michael Abrams, clarinet

Grace Lai (flute) & Michael Abrams (clarinet) perform Matthew Burtner’s ‘A’aa’ at KcEMA event at La Esquina in Kansas City (03-DEC-2010)

H ow much information is carried in [neural] spike trains? Should we use the discrete theory or the continuous one? Spike times are not discrete, and discrete calculations don’t seem to give satisfactory answers. But, on the other hand, the continuous theory assumes a continuous space, and, from the available evidence, that is clearly too strong an assumption to be valid. What, then, is the [mathematical, topological, metric] space to which spike train phenomena belong? While it might be possible to define the sum of two spike trains by simple linear superposition, it isn’t at all obvious how to define the difference. There is no reason to expect spike trains to be Euclidean. For example, with regard to color perception, MacAdam ellipses in color space are wildly non-Euclidean.”
— Conor Houghton, Trinity College, Dublin.

T he acoustic and optic stimuli we received at the KcEMA event held last night at La Esquina in Kansas City were intense, sensorially immersive, emotionally evocative, and thoroughly satisfying in terms of their well-crafted dramatic arcs, accessibility, and comprehensibility. The seven works performed were selected from among 120 compositions that were submitted by composers from around the world, in response to KcEMA’s call-for-scores last Spring.

Elainie Lillios (composer), Bonnie Mitchell (visual artist) – “2BTextures”: 2-movement work of abstract animation “takes the audience on an integrated sonic and visual journey into a surrealistic environment influenced by Nature.” This is an edgy, edgy piece with extensive, dramatic use of surround-sound spatial movement of sound, around the Mackie speaker array that was deployed around the perimeter of the audience seating area. The computer-generated visual displays were very high-dimensionality animations, with many tens of thousands of dynamic objects projected in motion at each moment.
Bret Battey (composer, videographer) – “Sinus Aestum”: inspired by the eponymous plain on the Moon’s surface, smooth and dark, “articulated by threads of white dust, like the tips of flowing waves.” Music and video sequences are propelled by algorithmic processes that sample the digital imagery of surface topographic XYZ structures of this lunar plain. It reminds me of ‘Swarm’ software, with autopoiesis and phase-transitions generated by adaptive networks of communicating processes, much like nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations in statistical physics and chemistry, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and other processes in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Composer as Dawkinsonian “blind watch-maker” impersonal God, initializing the universe and letting Creation auto-unfold as it may. This is utterly phenomenal and without doubt one of the most elegant unifications of light and music I have so far had the pleasure to experience. Bravo!
Matthew Burtner (composer) – “A’aa”: includes field recordings of lava flows and associated sounds emitted by an active Guatemalan volcano, and expresses deep ecology at a primeval, violent, chaotic, low frequency-spectrum, butt-thumping level via the Mackie SRS1500 subwoofer—convincingly conveying the notion that human affairs are puny compared to stochastic geophysical mechanical processes: not only beyond our control but largely beyond the reach of human technologies even to monitor or measure or predict. Burtner’s Nature is uncaring; however, it is not malevolent. It does not wreak shock and awe on all sentient life-forms, human and otherwise. Instead, the shrieks and rumblings of the Earth pushing viscous molten rock are surprisingly benign; nothing is imminently about to explode; this Guatemalan volcano is somewhat like standing very close to a powerful waterfall that is not going anywhere and is not going to kill us. The lava cools, creating solid crusts, and these smash together under the pressure of still-molten material behind them, generating breaking, shattering sounds. [I very much liked the percussionist, mashing fist-sized lava rocks together. The miked grating, smacking sounds of these added high-frequency effects on top of the thundering volcano sounds. Grace Lai’s flute and Michael Abrams’s clarinet, both playing long, sustained notes with pitch-bending and harmonics rounded out this ecoexperience, complementing the timbres of the realtime volcano sounds.]
Jeffrey Hass (composer), Elizabeth Shea (choreography) – “Magnetic Resonance Music”: composed after his having an MRI exam, during which he “focused on bizarre, strident, extremely loud noises and complex rhythms the machine was making.” The world according to Hass has humans as guinea pigs, to whom things are done or happen passively while doctor-priests tell you to hold perfectly still. Shea’s choreographed movements are wonderful counterparts to Hass’s impulsive quasi-chaos syncopated music. Very cool!
Christopher Burns (composer) – “Sawtooth”: mash-up of elements of visual performance and sound-art. Instead of a personal sensor-area network with transducers capturing biomechanics signals from a live performer’s limbs and trunk (3-axis accelerometers, gyros, joint goniometer angles, etc.), Burns uses the video camera on the LCD monitor of his laptop computer to capture the motions of his arms and torso and hands, which he moves Theremin-style . Scene-recognition, edge-detection, and vector velocity computations from the realtime video image datastream of motions of the performer captured from the camera are translated in software and converted into both music and visual animation. The gestures are transformed into a rich palette of pitch set and crescendo/decrescendo and articulation and other motifs. Simultaneously, the gestures yield an interesting range of optical and animation effects, projected on the walls of the performance space. The spatial positions and colors and intensities and sizes (scale) where newly ‘launched’ animation objects appear depend on the position and speed and direction as well as ‘open-hand/closed-hand’ morphology of gestures that Burns makes with his hands. The result is a truly beautiful, cohesive integration of sound and light. [Just as with the recent ‘Faster Than Sound’ event at Aldeburgh, there are issues regarding our less-than-optimal notational idioms for scoring complex computer/electronic music – video/light-show compositions, to sufficiently specify what comes precisely when and specify interfaces for multiple disparate acoustic and optical effects in technology-interoperable, manufacturer-independent ways – so as to facilitate future rehearsals and performances by persons other than the composer/video artist/dancer(s) and on the equipments of future decades when the computers and other devices and patches we now have are long-since obsolete.]
Robert Ratcliffe (composer) – “Phoenix”: repeated resurrection from sonic ashes “explores the possibility of combining characteristic features of synthetic‐driven electronic dance music genres such as acid house and techno” with elements of instrumental and electroacoustic composition. I am reminded of the sounds that titanium robot insects make during the raves that precede their exuberant mating season. This thing is absolutely danceable—very, very nice.
Mike McFerron (composer) – “Prelude to You Brought This On Yourself”: sonically explores the physical and emotional abuse experienced by an openly homosexual youth, and “attempts to comment on a human collective intolerant of an individual voice, who is not asking to be understood or even heard, but simply allowed to exist.” The tintinnabulations of small bells are synchronized with images of people that flash in front of us, accompanied by short voice-over recordings, mostly of anti-gay hate-speech by conservative religious figures. This is a deeply moving, powerful testament to the courage and resilience of those who are harmed—be prepared to be moved to tears as you listen and watch: no mere electronic music or multimedia installation work, it is a galvanizing, effective example of art as political intervention to bring about a more just society.

Battey—‘Sinus Aestum’

W hy do light shows combined with music affect us in ways that are substantially different from either stimulus taken separately? Are there features of dynamic light displays that, when designed and synchronized with music, might optimally stimulate our senses and enhance the depth of our reception of the music?

I s there a point of “sensory overload” or “diminishing returns” as regards multi-sensory stimulation to accompany music? Conversely, why do periods of silence or darkness that sometimes arise in electronic music / lightshow events cause hallucinatory acoustic and optical experiences? How might composers understand and leverage these neurophysiologic phenomena to better advantage, expressively?

M ight there in the future be implantable prosthetic devices—or legal, safe, and effective “performance-enhancing medications” (esp. glutamatergic ones or GABA-ergic ones, to modulate corticofugal transmission)—that could further enhance or extend the scope of these tandem multi-sensory experiences?

W hen I fly on long trans-oceanic flights and listen to my iPod, my perceptions of music are distorted, sometimes in interesting, revelatory ways. How, if at all, would combinations of music and light in zero-gravity space environments differ? Could space-tourism include specially-composed music and accompanying light displays that would capitalize on the sensory biophysics anomalies up there, to produce an extraordinary kind of transcendence for the travelers?

M ight electroacoustic music-light compositions in the future be composed so as to be more effective for music therapy purposes, compared to current conventional “music-only” music therapy?

H ow do the experiences that people with autism-spectrum disorders have of light-sound compositions differ from others’ experiences?

T hese questions occurred to me last night as I listened to the performances of electroacoustic and computer-based compositions at La Esquina in Kansas City. (The same questions had dogged me when I attended last month’s ‘Faster Than Sound’ event in Snape.)

Burns – ‘Sawtooth’

N eural coding has traditionally been assumed to be one of rate-coding: the stronger the stimulus, the more action-potentials per second that a sensory neuron transmits, and the stronger the perceived sensation is.

H owever, it’s now known that in various sensory systems there is ‘sparse temporal neural coding’. The timing and univariate temporal pattern of action-potentials and sequences of clusters of them in a single neuron itself carries information. The bivariate or multivariate temporal pattern of concurrently-incident action-potentials in multiple neurons, which may perhaps be in different sensory pathways (such as acoustic nerve and optic nerve pathways, thalamic pathways, cortical pathways, etc.) may likewise carry [different] information.

T he processing of sensory information by the brain is difficult to understand, in part because of complex interconnections between the sub-cortical and cortical areas. connections between the thalamus and the cortex in the brain are reciprocal, with information carried both in “feed-forward” [peripheral nerves to thalamus to cortex] and “feed-back” [cortex to thalamus] directions. Sensory signals reach the cerebral cortex after having traversed many synapses along multiple pathways. Acoustic and optical signals interact in the thalamus and possibly elsewhere, in both mutally excitatory and mutually inhibitory ways.

C onor Houghton at Trinity College, Dublin, has recently examined spectro-temporal receptive fields and filter functions in studies of the neurophysiology of bird song, using analytic formalisms of van Rossum metrics and non-Euclidean spaces. Useful, I think, for human music analysis, and not just of multi-sensory music-visual works...

A nd Stephen Coombes’s and Paul Bressloff’s edited volume (link below) covers how the patterns of spiking activity provide a substrate for the encoding and transmission of information, that is, how do neurons compute with spikes? It is likely that an important element of both the dynamical and computational properties of neurons is that they can exhibit bursting, which is a relatively slow rhythmic alternation between an active phase of rapid spiking and a quiescent phase without spiking—which is altered by “cross-talk” (statistical cross-correlations) between the spiking patterns evoked by concurrent stimulation by music and light.

W ith regard to the ‘sensory overload’ question, there is a fair amount of recent research that is germane to this. In mathematics, the triangle inequality is a defining property of norms and measures of distance. This property must be established as a theorem for any function proposed for such purposes for each particular space. For example, the triangle inequality holds for spaces such as the real numbers, Euclidean spaces, L^p spaces (p ≥ 1), and inner-product spaces. Maybe it also holds for multidimensional perceptual spaces, such as ones involving simultaneous stimulation by sound and light.

E ven if these are one-of-a-kind experiences never to be quite the same twice, and even if the communication impact of multisensory stimulation is subadditive in terms of quantitative neurophysiology and biophysics, the qualitative expressive and aesthetic result of any particular performance can nonetheless be really, really wonderful. Congratulations to each of these composers/artists/performers on these fine compositions and ‘sensorially whelming’ performances at KcEMA!

M usical Ecoacoustics embeds environmental systems into musical and performance structures using new technologies. Ecoacoustics derives its musical procedures from abstracted environmental processes, remapping data from the ecological into musical domain. It draws on techniques of sonification, acoustic ecology and soundscape composition (e.g, Truax, Westerkamp, Keller and others). The data from nature may be audio information (from wind or ocean waves, for example), or it may be a signal produced from some measurable parameter such as temperature timeseries, geological change or seismic data, astrophysical data, and so on. Going beyond mere direct sonification, the composer develops a syntax on the basis of the recorded natural processes, and creates new patterns conforming to this syntax.”
— Matthew Burtner on ecoacoustics.