Sketches of possible sculptural forms (these are roughly 8-10″ in height). The first four are my favorites:
Sound prototyping: A short composition of 4-7 sine wave oscillators harmonizing and disharmonizing:
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Two videos of synth design approaches: 8-bit R2R DAC and Schmidt trigger oscillator.
Lux Vocis is an interactive installation piece that draws laser portraits of a participant’s voice. Check out this demo at the ITP 2009 Winter Show:
Read the full NIME Conference Paper!
Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous. More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.
The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer. The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron. With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.
CHRONOTRONIC WONDER TRANSDUCER is a miniature discollective of musick artists and poet-inventors. Using a variety of means and methods, from hand-made electronics to custom-designed software, to conjure electromechanical invocations to dead gods and summon sound from the deep void of silence. CWT’s lineup includes:
Plastic tarp rain-sheds put up under the scaffolding next to the Tisch building on Broadway. The tarps really affect the space of the sidewalk-scaffolding corridor in an interesting way, making it feel more intentional and … agreeable.
These proposals all incorporate a mechanical mark-making method (hah) as well as a
Proposal: This laser drawing machine uses an enclosed system of a low-powered green laser and voice-coil actuated mirrors to draw figures on a stationary or scrolling sheet of thermal fax paper, generating patterns of varying style and complexity. The patterns are generated algorithmically from the collapsed soundtracks of various experimental films.
I’ve begun developing an algorithmic, recursive gestural tree using JavaScript to draw into the HTML5 <canvas> element. After running into a few initial problems, like discovering I was overflowing my browser stack limit, I progressed to some scribbly sketches.
Fixing the locating problems yielded these:
I then decided to move towards a continuous, single line composed of Bezier segments:
This could easily pave the way for a recursive sketching algorithm that composes each Bezier segment from n number of smaller Bezier segments down to a predefined number of levels. The larger question, in this investigation, remains: what determines the high-level gestures?
The contour that a hand describes arcing through space is of a fundamentally different nature than the contour of a pencil’s mark, which is a remnant, but not from that of the hand that wielded the pencil.
Here we find the critical separation between the act and its imprint, between the cause and the effect. Dance is a medium of causes that crucially leaves no mark except that of the phenomenological mark in the mind (brain) of the reader (observer).
When viewing a dance, under casual circumstances, we may not bother to attempt to fix in our imaginations the curvature that a body traces in the air, but rather leave it as a more holistic impression, an abstraction characterized by high-level features (degrees of activity, changes in energy-level, recognizable gestural signs, etc.). The contours of a moving body supplement the contours of the body itself, extending it into another measurable dimension. Visualizing these lines is not necessarily the goal, but rather building an awareness of them that shapes the perception of the entire dance.
Traditionally, and in general, dances do not leave marks in the sense that drawings do. Dance does not visibly or permanently alter the intrinsic medium of its performance (spacetime). A drawing does, however, transform a medium, additively or subtractively, with the aid of an extrinsic influence or medium (a pencil, a brush, an eraser, pigmented oil and water). A dance’s extrinsic medium is the dancers that make it up, and its mark is like that of a poem read aloud—accomplished over time, with only the audience’s senses and memory available to contemplate the artwork. A dance-poem leaves no residue upon its own medium.
The notion of function–of goals, of utility–in music is interesting in that music is rarely considered to have an intended function. Entertainment, perhaps, but usually only implicitly: a band usually does not get together and ask themselves, “What will be the purpose of our songs?” Many might jump to suggest the transmission of a message of one kind or another. This is possible with lyrical music, but as I argue in another post, impossible in music lacking a conventional language.
Intentional usage of music is another story, but again, for most it is an automatic act, a habituation that arises over years of learned associations and tendencies. Here and there our choice to listen and choice of music will have a more conscious intent; a jogger chooses something commensurate to the intensity of their run, or a DJ will seek a style and mood to reflect her audience.
In my own experience, one of the only conscious, self-aware objectives I have for music selection is that to which to sleep. I have long been fascinated, occasionally obsessively, by ambient music–music with no rhythm*, that lulls and that evolves over long periods of time, challenging the individual’s perceptual capacity to detect change.
Much of this music has a soporific character or effect, which is often, in fact, intentional. Consider Robert Rich’s sleep concerts: performances designed specifically and explicitly for an audience to sleep to. Playing ambient music while falling asleep never emerged for me as a remedy or cure, but rather as an enhancement to the enigmatic twilight state that precedes sleep, a time in which the shadows cast by moonlight take on an even more lustrous character, where poetry abounds in the edges and interstices of consciousness. I have vivid and affective childhood memories of planetaria in which music like this was played: soft, mysterious tones and drones that hinted of vast silver fields at night and, of course, their accompanying myriad and sundry constellations.
Ambient artists so far within my purview include Steve Roach, Stars of the Lid, Brian Eno, Lustmord, Lull, Coil, Bass Communion, Tim Hecker, Zoviet*France: and the aforementioned Robert Rich, and are but an inkling of the many more that are out there.
For merely one example of these kinds of textures, I offer “You Were Alive,” a piece I recorded last year:
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* Examples of ambient music with rhythm are plentiful, the most well-known doubtless being Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works volumes, but I cannot generally sleep to them. These works may perhaps be more accurately classified as “ambient techno.”
Tiny Eyebeam is a 1/100 scale model of Regular Eyebeam, and from now until July 2oth they are reviewing tiny residency applications (1/100 the time of the Regular application review). Successful applicants will then have 2 tiny days (1/100 the time of a Regular residency) and $50 to complete their (maybe tiny) projects. Apply with a direct message to their Twitter account!
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