jwilzewske: microfiction

Showing posts with label microfiction. Show all posts

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Parker Quartet: Microludes, Cloud Computing, and Imagination-as-a-Service (IaaS)

S ome of the Microludes use simple dramatic devices such as long sustained notes, while others, such as the 10th, represent a terrifying tangle of string techniques. As there are moments of terror, so are there disturbing breaths of tragic lyricism and even a hint of gallows humor as suggested in the ninth. The total effect, however, is tragic desperation even if we cannot clearly define its source.”
— Lucy Miller Murray.

In China the short-short is called a ‘Smoke-Long’ story [the time it takes to smoke a cigarette].”
— Shouhua Qi.

O ne-page fiction should hang in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke.”
— Jayne Anne Phillips.

T he Parker Quartet’s performance last night in the UMKC Conservatory - Friends of Chamber Music Alliance Series was superb, their cohesiveness and intensity most impressive. The unusual program showcased a sort of vivid storytelling through music, a collectivistic mode of expression at which the Parker excels. You Can’t See Dogs on the Radio, as they say, but you have no doubt that they are there, that the dogs in the story are real live dogs. The Parker Quartet plays with imagination and realism that tops the most realistic video game or interactive fiction.

Daniel Chong, violin
Karen Kim, violin
Jessica Bodner, viola
Kee-Hyun Kim, cello

Dvořák — Cypresses, B.152 (I know that on my love; Death reigns; Thou only, dear one; Nature lies peaceful)
Kurtág — Twelve Microludes, Op. 13, ‘Hommage a András Mihály’
Hindemith — Quartet No. 3, Op. 22 (Fugato; Schenlle achtel; Ruhige viertel; Mässig schnelle; Rondo)
Mendelssohn — Quartet in E Minor, Op.44, No. 2 (Allegro assai appassionato; Scherzo; Andante; Presto agitato)

K urtág’s ‘12 Mikrolúdium Vonósné-Gyesre’ Op. 13 were composed in 1977–1978, commissioned by the Witten Festival, and were given their world premiere in Witten on 21-APR-1978 by the Éder Quartet. Each microlude is a “micro fiction”, phenomenally brief, the longest of them being 130 seconds and the shortest a mere 17 seconds. The emotional impact of each nanostory both is tremendous, and the impact of the concatenation of them even more so.

I n her pre-performance remarks, violinist Karen Kim encouraged the audience to consider these vignettes as similar to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, each volume containing 24 preludes and fugues, chromatically organized in all the major and minor keys. Kurtág’s Twelve Microludes feature each key in ascending half-steps beginning with C.

P ieces so short as these carry tremendous risk. In micro fiction, if you are coercing concision, you run the risk that you will be overpowering or cruel or clichéd, as in Hemingway’s famous six-word story, ‘For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.’ Plot and character development and meaning are eroded if the form is too severely truncated/compressed. The information-carrying capacity of the available bytes is too small; it is like lossy jpegs—hard to be sure of what scenes and meanings are depicted in the bits of blurry evidence.

B ut in the Kurtág we get rich and spontaneous observations of people in as little as 17 seconds; we get both their superficial expressions and their deep inner pathologies. What we experience in Parker Quartet’s performance—what is especially distinctive about it—is the crystal-clear, unambiguous consistency of their quartetly “we,” regardless of individualistic feelings, emotions, or extrinsic thoughts the quartet members may be having. We are, at this moment, all the same, they seem to say: an assemblage of 4 persons, creating one singularity, one reality. “See it? It floats above us, about 1 meter above our heads, in the column of air between our music stands.”

A nd we in the audience eagerly attach ourselves to the intangible forms—the images and fleetingly accepted ideas, which become our “anchors” in this plane of reality. Over the ensuing seconds, those fixations and attachments become the “bars” that cage us and constrain our understanding as well as entrance us. We remain in this plane; we attach ourselves to this plane; we go with the Parkers’ flow.

T he colors and shapes of our emotions within each piece: short-short stories, slices of life. As such, we narrow the time frame and geographical location of each piece. Kurtag’s ’12 Microludes’ is playful—10 minutes of experimentation and exploration of limits. The four voices pass contrariwise—languid sustained notes, accelerating to disorienting tangles. We listeners are not given much of any anchor to hang onto or point-of-reference to maintain our bearings. These invisible dogs are wearing collars and leashes; the Parkers are showing them to us; we pet them. We readers/listeners are empowered to ascribe whatever personalized significance we wish. Interactive fiction!

T he fifth movement is maybe the most fictional one—folk melodies—some in foreground; others backgrounded—people passing each other, all of them are walking their braces of invisible dogs now, bumping into each other, greeting each other. “See it? At the end of this leash? My dog likes to eat nuts, cashews mostly. And that one likes cheese and bacon.”

S peaking of which, the Dvořák ‘Cypresses’ are micro fictions, too, but they are more programmatic or cashew-representational than the Kurtág ‘Microludes’. Kurtág is full of post-structuralist rhetorics ... a ‘metanoia’, a beyond-knowing or about-knowing-and-the-limits-of-knowing, an epistemology of surprise and doubt. Have a look at Jay David Bolter’s chapter in Philip Cohen’s multi-author edited volume (link below) if you are interested in these cashew-ey lit-theory things...

T he music encodes a compiled program—it has a set of initializations; procedural logic and flow-of-control; conditions; contingent outputs—I mean a set of software design patterns and objects and behaviors, whether perceived by us users as tendencies, rules, methods, or procedures. For this reason the formation of an implied code is a normal (and largely unconscious) process for any of us interactors, regardless of our level of technical experience. To possess an “implied code” doesn’t require that we interactors be skilled programmers with an aptitude for conceiving syntax in the compiled language or an aptitude for imagining new data structures.

I n fact, the presence or absence of such imaginings is beside the point. We are... we are cloud-based ‘Imagination-as-a-Service’ (IaaS) agents.

S ometimes our initial notions turn out to be wrong. Our “implied code” contains errors, and we discover that something crucial has changed after we receive what feels like a pop-up error message. Our mental model gets revised.

I nteractive fictions like these embody a sort of command-line-interpreter CLI user-interface, a site of negotiation between the composer, the performers, and us interactors/listeners: our imaginations contain the “objects” and procedural “methods” code for simulation and animation. The composer emits instructions. We cannot help but receive them, but the instructions may or may not be honored by the “implied code” of our listeners’/interactors’ conceptions.

I nteractive fiction is not a painting or photograph containing a command-line prompt or a transcript of a command-line and a new command-line prompt staring at us, nor is it a story describing a series of input command-lines and command-line prompts. It is not Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ nor Stephenson’s ‘Cryptonomicon’. Nor is it a movie scene replaying a command-line interaction, like ‘The Matrix’.

W e interactors are processes in Time, our implied codes contributing to a ‘coming-into-understanding’ system-services ‘stack’. We interactors progress in learning to interact, paralleled by the progress of the protagonists within each Microlude, protagonists who likewise struggle to understand something within the reality of the story, dogs and all. Implied code mallocs an epiphany—the climax—which gives way to the conclusion: the character understands the world in the moment that we listeners understand the code, and at that moment the work ends, and then dealloc/free() and process-rundown.

S o “implied code” in Kurtag is neither a set of instructions nor a transcript of past interactions. The implied code and objects that are instantiated in the minds of us interactors are a reflection of the source code, byte code, or musical manuscript they stand in relation to, but the result is a rendering into a set of an abstractly conceived network of opportunities, allowances, and prohibitions. At the command-line, whose input mode encourages experimentation and ad hoc going-with-the-flow, these prohibitions such as error messages affect our subsequent implied code.

O ur intertwined aesthetic and technical developments can be cast in narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, and ‘fabula / sjuzet’ distinction), in game-theoretic [micro—] ‘ludology’ (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and in filmic representations (subjective POV, time-loops). I add more links for your interest below...

I n short, I was blown away by the Parker Quartet’s captivating imagery and flawless technique. The unusual repertoire in last night’s ‘microfic’ program is the epitome of chamber music ensembles’ effectively appealing to broader audiences. And for beautiful art in such a program to end in our making some discoveries, as fictive energy accumulated around the gaps, the ‘unknowns’ in the mind between the ‘knowns’, seems fitting: total success. The Parkers’ invisible dogs were members of the cloud-based potentialDogs class until, in a sudden beautiful and memorable synaptic arc, the connection was made: closure. IaaS gave us visible realDog instances, while the music lasted.

F ounded in 2002, the Parker Quartet was in 2009 awarded CMA’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award which honors rising young string quartets. Currently, the Parker is in its second season as the Quartet-in-Residence with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and in 2010 they were the first-ever Artists-in-Residence with Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Afflicted Fingerings, Biomechanics, and Energy Budgets

B and B-flat, vying; then C and C#: yow! … all of which as if to reveal some hidden perversity in the interval itself, to show some concealed possible corner of the second’s personality … what the Second does when he’s at home alone, when no one’s watching.”
— Jeremy Denk, More about Goldberg Variations, ThinkDenk blog, 11-MAY-2009.

M y hand shifts to make a gradual transition in this Bach sarabande. I never fail to be impressed by how deeply afflicted this piece is. I think of these passages as several competing storylines crossing each other... chains upon [Dutilleux-esque] chains of expressive dissonances in the French Suites.

Bach, French Suite, No. 1 in D minor, BWV 812, mm. 7-8

W hat fingerings might be best? Bach’s Inventions No. 1 and 2 have been the focus for studies by Yuichiro Yonebayashi, Hirokazu Kameoka, and Shigeki Sagayama at the University of Tokyo (link below). They represent the positions and forms of hands and fingers as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) states and model the resulting sequence of performed notes mathematically as HMM transitions. Or, for me just now, Bach’s French Suites, BWV 812-817, Markovian fingers, compelled by what other neighboring Markovian fingers just did.

F ingering would be no problem were it not that music notes are preceded and/or followed by other notes.”
— Yuichiro Yonebayashi, Hirokazu Kameoka, and Shigeki Sagayama.

O ptimal fingering is essentially a problem of finding an optimal sequence of [reasonably] smooth state-transitions, from one state of each finger to the next. But the issue is not just about ‘ease’ or ‘reliability’ or ‘evenness’, even though those are of course important. The matter has also to do with texture and emotion. In fact, a thoughtful composer who is also a pianist knows very well what biomechanical ‘cost function’ or budget for effort or attention or energy expenditure will likely prevail for performers. If the composer’s intent is to devise an especially afflicted expression, then the composer chooses a key-signature and sequences of notes specifically with the intention of beleaguering or defeating performers’ biomechanics cost functions and built-in instincts.

W hen pianos were first invented, they were similar in size to harpsichords. Hand size was rarely a limiting factor throughout the eighteenth century because the keys were short and narrow and the repertoire usually contained intervals no larger than the octave. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the piano gradually expanded in range and key size. The use of cast iron frames led to an exponential increase in string tension, resulting in heavier and deeper actions that exacerbated problems for small-handed players. Nineteenth-century concert pianos typically featured actions with 6 millimeters of travel depth, requiring 23 gm of weight for full key depression and string tension in the middle register that ranged from 12 to 15 grams. By the end of the century, string tension had risen to 80 kg in the middle register, resulting in a heavier action with 9 mm of travel depth, requiring 45 g for full key depression. Today’s Steinway grands feature even heavier actions and larger hammers: 90 kg of string tension and 10.5 mm of travel depth, requiring 50 to 60 g of key depression force.”
— Lora Deahl & Brenda Wristen, American Music Teacher, JUN-2003.

I sometimes use 2-3-5 LH for triads and 1-2-3 for RH triads, leaving the thumb ready for 7ths or other contingencies. Also, my RH likes 1-3-5 or 1-2-5 when straddling black notes or for inversions or big gaps. But these produce tension in the hand—not just physical stretching but—I realize this now—brain stretching, too. Brain regions controlling the index finger and middle finger—fused under the influence of years of neuroplasticity—get anxious. They are apprehensive of more affliction that’s surely in-store.

T his Bach is undoubtedly about middle age and loss. Written in 1722 or a little earlier—two years after the sudden death of his first wife, Maria Barbara; now soon after his marriage to Anna Magdalena. Bach at 37—he hardly knew over-the-hillness first-hand, but he surely knew about loss. I realize that I am playing this differently now in my late 50s than I did 20 years ago, but I am not sure how to explain the difference in words.

I t has been more than 10 years since I played French Suites. The elapsed time is long enough to have lost any muscle memory I once had. Whole strategies and insights have vanished—and my old marked-up copy misplaced in one move or another along the way. Maybe my explanation for what is different is just that: beginning again, after some sort of catastrophe. Feels like physical therapy/rehab for someone who has suffered a stroke? You full-well know what your appendages ought to do, and you know the self-possessed sensations that you intend, but the body doesn’t cooperate—or even feel like your own self, really.

W hen working out your fingerings—even for a piece that is vexingly familiar and yet alien, like this one is for me right now—you often start at the beginning of a passage and plot your strategy forward from there. Sometimes, though, I prefer to first find the points that demand a specific finger. These points mark constraints such that you must have the requisite finger to proceed into the next phrase; such points are often the highest or lowest points in a passage. In the RH, you don’t usually want to end up with fingers 1 or 2 on the highest note (LH lowest note), nor do you want to end up on 4 or 5 on the lowest note of a RH passage (highest in the LH)—especially if the thing is going to immediately reverse direction. Once you’ve identified those constraints, you can work outward, both upstream and downstream, to plan your optimal fingerings.

I mark each place that involves a finger substitution, a change of fingering on a repeated note, or crossings (4-over-5; 2-over-1; 3-over-1; 4-over-1; 1-under-2; 1-under-3; 1-under-4; 5-under-4). I used to do this in pencil, and sometimes I still do this. But in the last couple of years I prefer to do it with e-markups in MusicReader™ software, which I use with my AirTurn™ pedal.

I mark more non-standard fingerings—the more afflicted the passage, the more non-standard it gets. For example, a passage may have a D minor scale in the RH, but it may continue to the octave E. One conventional fingering would cross to 1 on the high D and place 2 on the E. If it were then to return, you would have another crossing (1 - 4 on D to C) almost immediately. In this instance, a non-standard fingering such as 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 may be more effective. Bach as ‘rehab’; rehab as [self-] ‘discovery’...

Friday, May 14, 2010

An Accumulation of Energies, Nameless and Named: Evening Chamber Music in Prague

O nce you’ve seen the signs about it [The Most-photographed Barn in America!], it becomes impossible to ‘see’ the barn,’ said Murray.
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.
‘We’re not here to capture an image; we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies...’
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
‘Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see [and hear] only what others see [and hear]. The thousands who were here in the past; those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception.”
— Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985).

A ve Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.
Ave cuius conceptio,
solemni plena gaudio,
celestia, terrestria,
nova replet letitia.
Ave cuius nativitas,
nostra fuit solemnitas,
ut lucifer lux oriens
verum solem preveniens.
Ave pia humilitas,
sine viro fecunditas,
cuius annunciatio
nostra fuit salvatio.
Ave vera virginitas,
immaculata castitas,
cuius purificatio
nostra fuit purgatio.
Ave preclara omnibus
angelicis virtutibus,
cuius fuit assumptio
nostra glorificatio.
O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.”

W e hastily ran around the small central core of Prague—the Stare Mesto (old town) and the Hrad (castle). The evenings were dark and delicious.

W e found the astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall to be especially interesting, both symbolically and from an engineering point of view. At the top of the hour, the clock features a procession of figurines of the 12 apostles, preceded by the figure of Death (you can see him in the picture above, on the right-hand side) pulling a rope in his right hand, and inverting the hourglass that’s in His right hand. Each evening, we attended one or two concerts featuring Mozart, Vivaldi, local Czech composers—at the baroque Church of St. James, for example. The evenings had more renditions of Ave Maria than I ever knew existed.

E ach night from 8 p.m. onward you can find many—dozens?—of these chamber performances—in churches and other small halls. Very modestly-priced. Small ensembles, quartets, trios, duets, violin and piano, cello and piano, violin and piano and voice, voice and harp, violin and harp and organ/harmonium, string trio with trumpet, violin and harp and flute--anything and everything. Mostly, these are short programs less than 1 hour in length, cash admission collected at the door, with repertoire picked to appeal to a touristic audience and insure a nice extra income for the performers, many of whom are professional members of standing orchestras or chamber ensembles in and around Prague.

I nvariably, there is at least one version of Ave Maria.

F amous and familiar as it is, the most frequently performed is the version by Charles Gounod, who added melody and words to J. S. Bach’s first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Mozart’s K.554 is the one next most common version on offer. Brahms’s Op. 12.

A ntonín Dvořák’s version, the one composed in 1877. Another one, Verdi’s, for his 1887 opera Otello.

R ussian composer César Cui’s obsession: he is one of several composer ‘repeat offenders’ who have set the text at least three times: Op. 34, for 1 or 2 women’s voices with piano or harmonium (1886), and as part of two of his operas: Le Flibustier (premiered 1894) and Mateo Falcone (1907). Anton Bruckner wrote three different settings...

S ettings by Bruch, Byrd, Elgar, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Stravinsky, Schubert, Massenet, and Perosi as well as versions by less well-known composers, such as J.B. Tresch.

J acques Arcadelt’s setting: in reality, a 19th century arrangement by Pierre-Louis Dietsch, based on Arcadelt’s three-part madrigal, ‘Nous voyons que les hommes’.

F ranz Schubert’s ‘Ellens dritter Gesang’ (D839, Op 52. No. 6, 1825), performed with the Ave Maria prayer sung in place of the original text.

A lso, Josquin Desprez, Orlando di Lasso, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Nights are cool, chambered Grace, full of Marys. Collective, maintained perception—sort of like DeLillo's most-photographed barn, or like Motif #1.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Miniature Character Pieces Work by Hormesis?

A microcosm of the very newest music: one is staggered by the extensive differentiation of technique and form... Modern music is rarely so multi-dimensional, rich in changes and exciting.”
— Münchner Merkur.

H ormesis (from Greek: hórmēsis – ‘rapid motion, eagerness’; from ancient Greek: hormáein – ‘to set in motion, impel, urge on’)
n. favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors.”

M iniatures—whether literary or film or musical—have a special power if they are well-constructed. Reading Harvey Stanbrough’s guide for authors who wish to write ‘flash fiction’, I put pianist Guy Livingston’s ‘Don’t Panic’ disc in the CD player...

L ife as character-piece, life as inevitably ‘miniature’ compared to what we might wish.

A nd ‘humor’ turns out to be a luxury that depends on our having a future to reflect on what was funny and a past to contain things remembered. No future, not much past, not much memory, then no humor—at least not in the normal sense of ‘humor’.

A ny exposure that exhibits a ‘U-shaped’ dose-response curve, something that yields beneficial effects in small doses and deleterious effects in large doses, is said to be ‘hormetic’. Through miniature character pieces like the ones on Livingston’s CD and DVD, we vicariously are able to experience a kind of musical hormesis. We receive just enough sonic stimuli to grasp what the narrative means; the narrative inspires us and propels us; and then it is gone.

M any insect species have very short lives, you know, some existing for only days. The mayfly famously has the shortest life span of all—the adult stage lasts for as little as 30 minutes, sometimes as much as a day. Some humans have tragically truncated lives, too, living on borrowed time. Our species is not prepared for this.

I n the days ahead here in the middle north latitudes, mayflies will be swarming over treetops near rivers or freshwater ponds or lakes. The pre-adult stages are aquatic and will last a few days. And they will moult and moult, again and again, and then live just minutes to hours as adults: just long enough to mate and, for the females, to deposit their fertilized eggs. Some male mayflies are lucky enough to perform their mating dance over placid water at sunset, joined by females. Others who moulted early in the day won’t make it to such an auspicious, romantic hour—noon, only, or 3 p.m.

D enis McKeown and colleagues at the Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, study the neurophysiology of sonic ephemera (see links below). They find that when listeners attempt to discriminate between sounds separated by an interval of time—seconds, minutes—they do rather well, to the extent they are able to encode the remembered sound into a category with a verbal description. When we remember what someone has said some minutes ago, we recall word- and sentence-level descriptions and usually not fine, detailed acoustical information. Actually, not quite. We may recall the timbre of the voices, or macro-acoustical information, such as remembering “Cecelia sounded hoarse this morning.”

W hen we listeners discriminate between motivic material separated by seconds instead of minutes, we do really well. And if we know in advance that the narrative, whatever there may be of it, will be transacted within seconds and then vanish, then our attention is tremendously acute.

N europsychologists have recently studied how our brains perform ongoing, continuous, realtime processing comparing recently experienced or common sounds with transient new or slightly different sounds. This involves subtracting the averaged pattern of the evoked potentials record for the common repeated sound from the averaged response to the less common slightly different sound.

T he difference is what’s called a ‘mismatch response’ or ‘mismatch negativity’ (MMN). MMN signals reveal that our brains are compiling auditory models of the recent past, and, when something novel comes along, the auditor and mental models are updated. There is good evidence that the ‘model’ is not actually a log of sensory memory, but neither is it a verbal description. More like an unsayable abstraction, on the boundary between higher-order sonic abstractions and the ‘hardware-level’ sensory trace from the ears’ cochlear function.

T he ‘timbre memory model’ (TMM) proposed by McKeown and Wellsted (link below) offers a scheme that accounts for interference in auditory memory. TMM postulates a memory buffer which retains recent sonic information in the form of a compressed encoded spectrum. This spectral code is comprised of a number of frequency-specific components of each tone—features that define different auditory objects (here ‘feature’ refers to predominant spectral peaks, not just frequencies of a component tone, but amplitudes and phases of components as well). Together, these individual short-term memories build up a contextual model of our recent auditory environment and its trajectory.

T o do this, our auditory memory buffer is continuously updated by incoming sensory events over 8- to 20-second periods. Auditory events consisting of novel features require the model to be updated—whereas auditory events comprised of repeated features don’t drive model-updates. TMM hypothesizes that auditory interference and ‘mismatch’ is only caused by tones that present features that are ‘novel-in-recent-context’ and cause updates and memory scavenging, a bit like ‘garbage collection’ (GC) in Java or LISP or other programming languages.

O ur meat computer’s fusion of direct and reflected sounds into a single ‘image’ that is perceived at the location of the original sound is referred to as the ‘precedence effect’. Precedence enables us to localize the sound source and understand it with reasonable accuracy despite the presence of potentially conflicting multi-directional information from reflections.

M aybe there are ‘precedence effects’ at higher levels of abstraction as well.

I n general, my own meat computer experiences each of the compositions on the Guy Livingston CD and DVD as something like free-fall with a parachute.

T here’s a cognitive/narrative difference, I should think, between a 3-sec free-fall in an amusement-park ride (Tower of Power) and a 5-min parachute-jump free-fall from an airplane and a 20-min descent in an unpowered glider. The 3-sec experience resembles, I think, literary microfictions; the piano miniatures that Livingston performs; the lives of mayflies.

Parachute-equipped Kittinger enters EXCELSIOR balloon, 1960

I t’s been postulated that memory consolidation processes require post-learning molecular changes that will support long-term experiences. Blocking dopaminergic D1 and/or N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors impairs consolidation processes: it degrades long-term memory but not short-term memory. But if no long-term experiences will be forthcoming for us--as for mayflies, as in the Livingston CD and DVD--then short-term incentive-salience is all there is, and our neurobiology would do well to maximize the short-term experience for what it is, D1 and NMDA signals or no D1 and NMDA signals.

A lthough interference is a well-established forgetting function in short-term auditory memory, an adequate understanding of its underlying mechanisms is still a ways off into the future. McKeown's listeners compared standard and comparison complex tones, having distinct timbres (four components varying in frequency), over a 5-sec retention interval and made a same-different response. This interval either was silent or included one of 15 distractor tones occurring 0 millisec, 100 millisec, or 1,200 millisec after the standard. The distractors varied in the extent to which the frequencies of their component tones were shared with the standard. Individuals’ performance in comparing the consecutive tones was significantly impaired by distractors composed of novel frequencies, regardless of the temporal position at which the distractor occurred.

T hese results, compatible with teh TMM put forward by McKeown and Wellsted, suggest that interference in our meat computer’s auditory memory operates via a ‘feature-overwriting’ mechanism with automatic GC. We don’t ordinarily notice it much. But the Livingston CD and DVD can make the mechanism very apparent.

B ased in Paris and Amsterdam, Livingston performs all over the world, notably as soloist with the Chicago Symphony, the Orchestre Nationale de France, and as a recitalist at the Centre Pompidou, the Théâtre du Chatelet, the IJsbreker, the MuziekGebouw, the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, and Le Poisson Rouge. His recordings of 20th and 21st Century repertoire include premieres of music by John Cage, George Antheil, and over 100 other ‘feature-overwriting, GC and update-inducing’ composers from around the world.

M ight there be a limit on the maximum number of rapid variations that our species can stand before dying, about 40 maybe (the so-called Hayflick limit), just like for the maximum number of moults or the maximum number of passages in cell culture?

W orks on the ‘Don’t Panic!’ CD.

Dan Warburton: Speed Study I
Jonathan Katz: WENDIGO
Daniel Landau: Losing it again
Carl Faia: What if I just said...
Roger Kleier: Step out of the Car
Donal Fox: The Scream
James Baiye: Database of Desire & spoken word
Roberto Andreoni: scendi un minuto
Brian Escriv: Mason and Dixon
Annie Gosfield: Brooklyn, October 5, 1941
Paul Beaudoin: re: dance (PNMR)
Marek Zebrowski: Ex tempore
Louis Andriessen: non [an] anfang
Christopher Culpo: Spangles
Isak Goldschneider: 42 Second Piano, tape effects & electronics
Richard Brooks: Conflict of Interest
Danielle Baas: Joke
Charles Shadle: Cowboy Song
Sophie de Wit: Who asked you?
Pepe-Tonino Caravaggio: EIGHT 8
Thomas Jefferson Anderson: Watermelon Revisited
Paul von Hippel: Kodaly Music Box
Eilon Aviram: NA'OU'RA (the Wedding Dance), prepared piano & percussion
Jonathan Norton: 59" of Piano
Alan Frederick Shockley: cold springs brand, 10 p.m.
Moritz Eggert: Hämmerklavier XI
Derek Bermel: MEDITATION
Tuyet Tran: Tonal Imagery
Fritz Lauer: Slusha, for C.E.
William Bolcom: A 60-second Ballet for chickens
Joshua Cody: Two-Chord Warp
Joanna Bailie: GIRO I
Martial Robert: I' de Tonio Kröger
Patricia Elizabeth Martinez: Absolutis-s
Riccardo Vaglini: PASSATEMPO
Gene Pritsker: i'm afraid you might ask for a fragment of my soul
Newt Hinton: Nakano-ku (à S.D.)
John New: Moondrunk
Patrick Cahallan: xxx.rhapsody
Yoichi Togawa: prelude I
Barbara Engel: Punch and Judy's Waltz
Joseph Rovan: Miro Sketch - Mostly Yellow
Frederick Frahm: Sonata Moirai
Victor Ekimovsky: Jenseits des Guten und des Bösen
Alper Maral: Verschiebung
Stephane Leach: Piano Piece for Guy
Ketzel Cotel: piece for paws
Vanessa Lann: DD (Double D)
Walter Haven: Minute Rice
Giovanni Mancuso: Saltarello for Guy, for piano, prepared tape & percussion
Sergio Pallante: Polis
D. Andrew Stewart: réveil
Elliott Sharp: Snaps
Robert Eidschun: Specks
Lionel Sainsbury: Prelude
Richard Carrick: Slowness
Walter Sanchez: Thinking
Atsushi Yoshinka: HARU NO YOI - Miyabi no Uta
Atanasio Khyrsch: Parce que je le vaux bien
Lansing McLoskey: Theft