Micro Performance

Mikro is a series of improvised performances using the immediate surroundings as raw material: A microscope captures everyday objects and surfaces like wallpaper, coins, clothing, furniture, newspapers and transforms it into an explosive universe of textures. Contact microphones and electromagnetic sniffers pick up unhearable sounds to create the live soundtrack. Mikro is a collaboration between HC Gilje (video) and Justin Bennett (sound). Performances so far: Paradiso (Amsterdam), IMAL (Brussels), TAG (den Haag), DNK (Amsterdam), Bergen Kunsthall Landmark (Bergen), Laznia (Gdansk) [posted on HC Gilje blog]

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Nov 26, 2007, 4:39PM

Sound in the Discourse of Synaesthesia

“In the late 1940s, radio engineer-turned-composer Pierre Schaeffer celebrated a defining property of audio recording and radio transmission: the ability to separate sounds from their visible sources. This affirmation cut against the grain of modern thought, for no lesser cultural critics than Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer had assailed these technologies for dulling our auditory sensibility. Schaeffer, however, argued that records and radio triumphantly subvert the hegemony of vision to make possible the experience of “sound as such.” In doing so, Schaeffer continued, they revive a neglected form of listening he termed “acousmatic,” in deference to the ancient akousmatikoi, disciples of Pythagoras who were made to listen to their master’s voice while he was hidden behind a curtain…” Continue reading Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse of Synaesthesia by Christoph Cox, Artforum, October 2005.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Nov 26, 2007, 5:07PM

. : Hogar Collection : .

All material in the Artforum
Archive is protected by copyright. Permission
to reprint any article from the Artforum archive
must be obtained from Artforum
Magazine.

Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse
of Synaesthesia

Author: Christoph Cox
Issue: October 2005

In the late 1940s, radio engineer-turned-composer
Pierre Schaeffer celebrated a defining property
of audio recording and radio transmission: the
ability to separate sounds from their visible
sources. This affirmation cut against the grain
of modern thought, for no lesser cultural critics
than Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Max
Horkheimer had assailed these technologies for
dulling our auditory sensibility. Schaeffer, however,
argued that records and radio triumphantly subvert
the hegemony of vision to make possible the experience
of “sound as such.” In doing so, Schaeffer continued,
they revive a neglected form of listening he termed
“acousmatic,” in deference to the ancient akousmatikoi,
disciples of Pythagoras who were made to listen
to their master’s voice while he was hidden behind
a curtain. (1)

Schaeffer’s position remains
a significant one within the practice of sound
art today. Indeed, any sound art worthy of the
name affirms something of this effort to restore
to sound its ontological and aesthetic value.
(Such insistence on the autonomy of sound and
its acousmatic experience is manifested most dramatically
now in the work of Spanish composer and sound
artist Francisco López, who performs behind a
shroud, urges his listeners to don blindfolds,
and delivers sonic abstractions that thwart recognition
of the environmental sounds from which they are
generated.) Yet for the most part, contemporary
sound artists and their curators have been interested
in negotiating the visual, rather than
rejecting it wholesale. In fact, the very
tension of such negotiation is what animates this
uncertain art form operating between music and
visual art, medium specificity and a postmedium
condition.

This provocative ambiguity becomes
particularly evident as one compares institutional
presentations of sound art since its coming to
prominence in the late 1990s. Exhibitions such
as “Volume: Bed of Sound” (P.S. 1 Contemporary
Art Center, New York, 2000), “Rooms for Listening”
(CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San
Francisco, 2000), “BitStreams” (Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, 2001), and the 2002
Whitney Biennial, for example, implicitly adopted
Schaeffer’s paradigm, providing banks of headphones
or darkened rooms for the acousmatic delivery
of audio. A contrary approach was taken in last
year’s “Treble” exhibition at SculptureCenter
in New York, which foregrounded the use of sound
as a tool to link media from drawing to sculpture.

But, a third strategy, surely
the most widespread and significant, has come
to prominence in a spate of recent shows presenting
sound under the banner of “synaesthesia,” an aesthetic
appropriation of the neurological condition in
which stimulation of one sensory modality triggers
involuntary sensation in another. Sound artists
and curators have long flirted with the “synaesthesia”
idea. However, this engagement has lately emerged—problematically,
it must be said—as the dominant mode of
conceiving conjunctions between the sonic and
the visual. At least five exhibitions have been
organized under this rubric within the past year:
the largely overlapping blockbusters “Visual Music”
(Hirshhorn, Washington, DC/moca, Los Angeles)
and “Sons & Lumières” (Centre Pompidou,
Paris), which reconsidered the history of modernism
as a story of crossovers between sight and sound;
then three smaller shows assembling new work in
this vein, “Synaesthesia: A Neuro-Aesthetics Exhibition,”
mounted at London’s Institute for Contemporary
Arts last fall, and “What Sound Does a Color Make?”
and “Crossed Circuits,” held
in New York this past summer at Eyebeam and the
Hogar Collection, respectively.

What are we to make of this new
fascination with synaesthesia? And what are the
stakes for the very conception of sound art? To
answer, it’s worth noting that the art world’s
attraction to sensory cross-wirings is in fact
part of a more general cultural formation. In
contemporary science, for example, freak occurrences
of colored hearing or tactile smell—dismissed
as fakery for much of the twentieth century—have
suddenly become the subjects of a booming industry
in the fields of cognitive psychology and neurology.
Developments in contemporary technology also promote
the idea of synaesthesia. Brain-imaging technologies
used to explore the phenomenon are, paradoxically
enough, themselves synaesthetic in their psychedelic
visual representation of nonvisual sensory phenomena.
This quality points to the more general fact that
digital technologies offer, if not a union
of the senses, then something akin: the intertranslatability
of media, the ability to render sound as image,
and vice versa. As Friedrich Kittler, who has
written extensively on communication technology,
puts it: “The general digitization of channels
and information erases the differences among individual
media. . . . Inside the computers themselves everything
becomes a number: quantity without image, sound,
or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn
formerly distinct data flows into a standardized
series of digitized numbers, any medium can be
translated into any other.” (2)

Finally, the new discourse on
synaesthesia must be considered against the background
of a broad revaluation of the senses and their
traditional hierarchy—particularly the modern
supremacy of vision over audition, sight over
sound. Since the 1960s, theorists from Marshall
McLuhan and Walter Ong to Jacques Attali and Thomas
Docherty have forecast this sort of revolution
in the sensorium. And while skeptics have treated
these claims as purely speculative or merely wishful,
there is growing empirical evidence for them.
Witness, for example, the recent profusion of
historical and anthropological scholarship—collected
in volumes such as Hearing History: A Reader
and Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening,
and Modernity (both 2004)—that takes
its evidence not primarily from sight, but from
sound. (3)

The emergence of sound art as
a prominent practice is aligned with this more
general revaluation of the senses and, particularly,
of hearing. And the curatorial and artistic interest
in synaesthesia is surely a strategy for dealing
with this emergence of auditory culture. Thus
far, this strategy has been complex and ambivalent.
On the one hand, the synaesthesia paradigm recognizes
and invites sound as an aesthetic element; on
the other, the paradigm still privileges the old
order, conceiving sound under the hegemony of
the visual and thwarting the development of a
genuine sound art.

Consider the example of “Visual
Music,” which was not so much a historical as
a genealogical effort to disclose the modernist
lineages of current sound-art practice and synaesthesia
discourse. The exhibition was subtitled “Synaesthesia
in Art and Music Since 1900″; yet, true to its
main title, it clearly favored the image. (In
contrast, “Sons & Lumières” only tangentially
flirted with synaesthesia, rightly subsuming it
within a more expansive examination of sound-image
relationships in the multimedia art of the twentieth
century.) From the “musical” canvases of Wassily
Kandinsky and Franti?sek Kupka to the musically
inspired but silent projections of Thomas Wilfred
and Leo Villareal, “Visual Music” almost solely
presented one-way translations from sound into
sight. One may reasonably ask why the curators
did not complement these selections with sound-centered
classics such as Walter Ruttman’s film-without-images
Weekend, 1930; Luc Ferrari’s Presque
rien (Almost Nothing), 1970, a sonic portrait
of dawn in a Dalmatian fishing village; Derek
Jarman’s monochrome film, Blue, 1993; or
a Janet Cardiff audio walk. Or why the exhibitions
“Crossed Circuits” and “What
Sound Does a Color Make?” similarly centered on
the image, focusing attention on screens, photographs,
and drawings that occluded sound by standing in
for it, much in the same way that the mute but
visible score came, within modernity, to circulate
as the musical work itself.

However lamentable, this imbalance
of media and sensation is true to the neurological
experience of synaesthesia. This condition (and
the aesthetic analogy to it) may hold out the
ideal of sensuous plenitude and cross-mixing;
yet by far its most common expression is the unidirectional
visual experience of sound. (Sound provoked by
sight is extremely rare. (4) In the aesthetic
domain, even when generated to enhance aural experience—for
example, the ’60s light shows featured in “Visual
Music” or, today, the iTunes Visualizer—the
visual is almost never a mere supplement to the
auditory. As film theorist Christian Metz points
out, our syntax and entrenched sensual hierarchy
hold us in thrall to a metaphysics according to
which sight and touch signify being and presence,
while sound—spatially vague, materially
elusive, and temporally ephemeral—signifies
absence and can only have the status of a secondary
“attribute” in relation to a primary visual and
tactile “substance.” (5) Cinema might in principle
be a synaesthetic art, an intersensorial conjunction
of sound and image. In practice, however, cinematic
sound is almost invariably subservient to the
image. So too is it with synaesthetic art more
generally. Indeed, the dominance of the visual
in synaesthetic art corresponds with the prevailing
idea that sound-in-itself is unnatural or inadequate,
in need of an anchor in the visible.

This situation was already evident
in early experiments with the visualization of
sound, most prominently those of Ernst Chladni,
an important but, until recently, neglected figure.
In 1787, Chladni drew a violin bow along the edge
of a metal plate covered with a thin layer of
sand. The vibrating plate bounced the granules
into symmetrical forms: stars, waves, grids, and
labyrinths. Chladni’s demonstration made visible
and palpable the hitherto elusive and fleeting
materiality of sound. Napoleon was so impressed
that he put Chladni on his payroll. Friedrich
Nietzsche was also intrigued; but he warned of
a potential misapprehension of Chladni’s results:
“One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and
has never had a sensation of sound,” he wrote.
“Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment
at Chladni’s sound figures; perhaps he will discover
their causes in the vibrations of the string and
will now swear that he must know what men mean
by ‘sound.’” (6) Wary of the attempt to
reduce sound to sight, Nietzsche insists that
the visual and the auditory constitute separate
spheres and that the relationship between the
two can only ever be a matter of translation or
metaphor (in the etymological sense of “carrying
over”) that bears the traces of an unassimilated
remainder. For Nietzsche, the distinction between
the metaphorical and the literal is simply that
the latter no longer acknowledges the difference
that constitutes it, taking itself to be
what it represents. Such literalness is
a chief characteristic of the aesthetic discourse
of synaesthesia today.

As Kittler notes, the ready translatability
of digital media encourages this literalness.
The fact that all digital material shares a common
base—binary code—supports the illusion
that sound, image, word, and movement can be made
identical and interchangeable. What is forgotten
is that they can be made so only via the intermediary
of arbitrary mapping formuli decided in advance.
This disparity was evident in the sound-image
juxtapositions of numerous pieces in “What Sound
Does a Color Make?” When sound and image pulse
together in Granular-Synthesis’s video projection
LUX, 2003, for example, it is because they
have been programmed to do so, not because of
any real correspondence between these sounds and
images. The same is true of the correspondence
between vocal tones and luminosity in Jim Campbell’s
Self-Portrait of Paul DeMarinis, 2003,
which uses sound to draw a pixelated figure with
LEDs, and the relationship between the viewer’s
movements and the alteration of image and sound
in Atau Tanaka’s Bondage, 2004, which features
a mutating digital photograph projected onto a
shoji screen.

Presented almost tangentially
in “Visual Music,” an excerpt from Oskar Fischinger’s
film Ornament Sound, circa 1932, provides
a very different and much richer model for sound-image
translation. The German abstract filmmaker drew
bands of jagged and undulating patterns across
the optical soundtrack and extending into the
visual frame. These forms, read by the projector
as both sound and image, produce corresponding
bursts of multitextured and variously pitched
noise. Sound ceases to be a mere accompaniment
to image or suture for visual cuts, but instead
collaborates directly with image in the production
of a genuine audio-visual experience. Indeed,
Fischinger’s forms appear as stylized versions
of ordinary optical sound bands and thus draw
attention to the sound track both visually and
aurally.

While scarcely followed in the
past seven decades, Fischinger’s model has been
rejuvenated today in a number of works utilizing
audio-visual feedback loops without any intermediary,
from Austrian video artist Billy Roisz’s __AVVA,__
2004, to installations such as Carsten Nicolai’s
Telefunken, 2000, and Scott Arford’s Static
Room, 2003. Arford, for example, begins by
generating a palette of video static: granulated
washes, throbbing bands, and pixel fragments.
He then runs the video output through the audio
input, producing a matching gamut of noise: dense
blasts, dirty pulses, and disintegrated drones.
The translation is effected not by the conversion
of color and sound to a neutral digital substratum,
or by the idiosyncratic sensual associations of
the artist, but is, rather, effected simply by
the routing of the electronic signal and the medium
of display. Herein lies the true potential for
a sound-art discourse steeped in a multisensory
approach. Where indirect and arbitrary digital
translation too often attempts to elide the differences
between media and sensory modalities, this direct,
analog translation does the reverse, intensifying
sensory differences and the materiality of the
video medium.

Such procedures and results not
only revive Fischinger but recapitulate the work
of video pioneers Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka,
and Gary Hill—selections by whom were included
in “What Sound Does a Color Make?” to the detriment
of the more recent work on view. For example,
Hill’s Full Circle (formerly Ring Modulation),
1978, brilliantly foregrounds both correspondences
and differences among sound, text, and image.
A video screen divided into three sections presents
several ways of rendering the sound of a voice
that repeatedly drones an “ahhh” sound held for
various durations and wavering in pitch and volume.
In the upper left portion of the screen, an oscilloscope
image represents the sound as a jittery, rotating
ring; below, a close-up image shows a pair of
hands bending a metal wire into a circle; above
right, the screen presents a distorted full-body
view of this wire-bending exercise. True to the
theme of circularity, one is never certain which
element controls which others. The voice seems
to be attempting to form a perfect circle in the
oscilloscope image that represents it, but it
could also be matching the hand movements that
seem to mimic its vocal fluctuations. The malleable
wire and quivering ring also reference the vibrating
vocal chords; and the title of the piece puns
on the verbal connection between the vocal-visual-manual
efforts to form circles and the technical process
of generating dissonance by multiplying electronic
signals (ring modulation).

From a quarter-century’s distance,
Hill’s piece presents an appropriate directive
to sound art today and underscores the deficiencies
of facile synaesthetic discourses. The best sound
works neither reject the visual nor succumb to
it, but instead amplify differences among media
and sensory modalities, drawing attention to sound
as a semiautonomous power. They are complex engagements
with the visual that intensify the moment of translation
and the movement of metaphor (in Nietzsche’s sense
of the term). For the silence of the visual can
cut two ways. It can stifle or, as John Cage taught
us, powerfully disclose sound. Exemplary instances
of this second sense are recent installations
by Stephen Vitiello, which feature suspended speaker
cones that tremble inaudibly. At once mouths and
ears, these mobilized membranes draw attention
to the kinetic energy of sound, the vibrations
that constitute its production and reception.

Or consider Christian Marclay’s
The Sound of Silence, 1988, a framed photograph
of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1965 single “The Sounds
of Silence”—displaying, in effect, the record
as a mute visual object. The piece is a joke,
but an epistemologically and ontologically profound
one, the humor of which consists in an evident
confusion of categories: Photograph, object, and
text are absurd because they cannot be what they
claim they are. Sound is thereby shown to be of
another order, one inadequately represented or
even foreclosed by the imaginary domain of the
visual and the symbolic domain of the written
word. Sound is real, Marclay’s work seems
to say, something too quickly forgotten by the
fantasy of a “union of the senses,” which remains
a visual fantasy. Genuine sound art today is fostered
not by this consensus but by a dis-sensus that
gives sound and hearing their due.

Christoph Cox is associate
professor of philosophy at Hampshire College and
coeditor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern
Music (Continuum, 2004).

NOTES

1. See Martin Heidegger, “The
Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977), 48; Theodor Adorno,
Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans.
Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), 213–317; Max Horkheimer, Dawn
and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969,
trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press,
1978), 162; and Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics,”
in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music,
ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 76–81.

2. Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon,
Film, Typewriter, trans. and with an introduction
by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–2.

3. Hearing History: A Reader,
ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 2004), and Hearing Cultures: Essays
on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit
Erlmann (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004).

4. See Richard Cytowic, Synesthesia:
A Union of the Senses, 2nd edition (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002), 16. See also Steven Connor,
“Intersensoriality,” www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/intersensoriality/.

5. Christian Metz, “Aural Objects,”
in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds.
Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), 154–61.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth
and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy
and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks
of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1979), 82.

Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence [Frankfurt]

Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence :: Opening: November 24, 2007; 8:00 pm :: until January 13, 2008 :: Portikus, Alte Brücke 2 Maininsel, 60594 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence is a combined art and architectural exhibition wherein the different parts in the exhibition are synthesised into a complete whole. The exhibition stages a theatre or space of communication: communication between the visitors and the exhibited works, between the virtual and the real. Throughout its period, the architectural installation will serve as a hub for various events including lectures, art performances, hosted talks with invited guests, and DJ-sessions.

The architectural installation, entitled The Thing, is designed by Städelschule professor for architecture Ben van Berkel together with professor Johan Bettum and Luis Etchegorry. The Frankfurt-based design-groups MESO Web Scapes and MESO Digital Interiors have developed a projection work that elaborates on the installation by dynamically embellishing it with moving images and thereby activating its surfaces. The projection work, On Things Off Things On, is a case study in augmented architecture. It is an attempt to create a reactive surface of extraordinary spatial complexity.

The installation, The Thing, consists of an upper and a lower level. The upper level serves as a form of theatre and the lower level as a more traditional exhibition space. The two levels are separated by a volumetric surface which is perforated by open holes. These holes serve to connect the two areas visually and audibly. On the lower level, the exhibition presents a group of works by artists and architects who have participated in the one-year long experimental project, entitled the Space of Communication, a project by the Städelschule Architecture Class (SAC).

The exhibiting participants in this project are the architects Asterios Agkathidis, Brennan Buck & Igor Kebel, Holger Hoffmann, Jonas Runberger, Gabi Schillig and the artists Florencia Colombo and Dani Gal.

Background

The exhibition Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence marks the end of the one-year long exploratory project the Space of Communication which consisted of a group of international artists and architects investigating various aspects of the contemporary conditions for social interaction and communication. The exhibition aims to present the artistic and architectural results of this project to the public.

While some of the projects inherently engage with new electronic technology, some take it for granted and others merely reflect upon it in a distant fashion. Common to all the projects is that they address the social and inter-relational aspects of communication or spaces of communication. In this manner the projects insist on the relevance of art and architecture to which new technology can only add but not change the basic missions or functions.

Needless to say, the emergence and current ubiquity of electronic media have had a revolutionary influence on the nature of spaces of communication. Even today, the electronic and digital technologies continue to change the conditions in which we relate and communicate with one another. These facts underlie much of the project existence and it has been developed with a keen interest in the many relevant historical and contemporary achievements within the arts and architecture.

The investigations in the Space of Communication have been undertaken in an ongoing discussion conducted through a series of seminars, Internet-exchanges and in project development efforts. The investigations have been guided by a series of invited specialists, first and foremost professor and architectural theorist, Sanford Kwinter (Rice University, Houston), and artist and professor Peter Hagdahl (Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm).

Bringing Architecture to Life

Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence presents an advanced shape projection design on architecture. This coincides with a general, increasing interest in projection on architecture. MESO Digital Interiors installation On Things Off Things On activates the structural surface of the installation. In this manner, it is also a very ambitious case study in augmented architecture, an attempt to create a reactive surface of extraordinary spatial complexity. The built structure inside the Portikus is illuminated by multiple precisely matched digital projections that both enhance and obscure the physical objects, adding information and disinformation, atmosphere and detail, playing on topics of presence, absence, body, and volume.

The installation will also be accessible via interactive live-feeds.
Journal 3 is the last of three Internet-journals that are published by the project group behind the Space of Communication. This quality is enhanced by the many events that are planned during the exhibition period. Some of these will be more conventional lectures and talks, but others will bring their own projected reality to the upper level of the theatre, turning the gallery into a performance space. Some events will fuse sound with images. In this manner, the liveliness and life-like qualities of the exhibition is emphasized.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Nov 24, 2007, 10:09AM

Analyzing Political Graphic Design

Ward Sutton takes a graphic look at what posters say about candidates for the U.S. presidency. NYT

Originally from Archinect.com Feed
reBlogged by michael

Live muscle cells on a polymer base…

Harvard’s Disease Biophysics group has developed a very interesting polymer that is coated with live muscle cells. Be sure to check the video…

Cell phone design video

Video from the Futures Channel: The Shape of Phones. See how designers and engineers at Motorola work together to fit everything they want into the same package, and somehow avoid killing each other in the process. Football’s a game of inches, cell phone design is a game of millimeters.

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Nov 16, 2007, 10:05AM

Transmedia, in the blink of an eye

Originally from This Blog Sits at the by Grant McCracken
reBlogged by michael on Nov 16, 2007, 12:51PM

Adobe Design Achievement Awards

Achtung Students! You should definititely submit an entry to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. The awards are quite generous, and there is no entry fee.

Ground Breaking + Live Algorithms

Ground Breaking – Experience Past Landscapes in Grains and Pixels by Paul Adderley & Michael Young: In this installation, a computer explores and represents nearly 10,000 years of soil records, revealing them in different colours and perspectives.

Landscapes reflect the lives and histories of the people who live in them. Scientific analysis of the soil can be used to examine how people lived in the past and provide lessons for future management of landscapes in extreme or fragile environments. We invite you to become part of the shifting scenes of the Sahel in image and sound and reflect upon its presence and history…

Soils can store information recording the way people have affected the land over thousands of years. Microscopic fragments of different objects found in the soil can tell us about past landscapes. The colour, size and number of fragments offer further clues about the management of landscapes. The latest advances in visual and sonic technologies allow us to illuminate and make audible these ancient landscapes. Sounds of the Sahel, and sounds made afresh are recalled and shaped by the computer using scientific information taken from the soil itself. The Sahel in Africa is an area at the fringe of the Sahara desert. It is one of the world’s most marginal environments yet is home to over 50 million people. With a dry season lasting eight months of the year and unreliable rainfall, survival is hard for farming communities. Climate change is keenly felt in the Sahel. Understanding how people managed this landscape during past periods of climate change is essential in developing successful responses to future changes.

Live Algorithms [PDF] by Tim Blackwell and Michael Young, Depts Computing and Music, Goldsmiths College, London:

“The EPSRC-funded Live Algorithms for Music (LAM) research network is establishing an inter-disciplinary community of musicians, software engineers and cognitive scientists. Our aim is to investigate autonomous computers in music.

The use of computers in live music is not new; the fields of generative (algorithmic) composition and live electronics are of particular interest to LAM. A key discriminator between these is the degree of interaction with the performer. Interaction is intrinsic to live electronics: a performer may jam with commercial or custom software; a ‘laptop-as-instrument’ paradigm, in which the computer is controlled directly. Another approach links players of traditional instruments with computers: incoming sound or data is analysed by software and a resultant reaction (e.g. a new sound event) is determined by pre-arranged processes. Such ‘reflex-systems’ can accompany performance but might also utilise stochasticity to effect surprise; as determined by organizational decisions made by the composer /designer. We would term such a system ‘weakly interactive’ because there is only an illusion of integrated performer-machine interaction, feigned by the designer. Algorithmic composition generates music off-line, although can be used in real-time.

Algorithms from such fields as fractals, chaos theory, neural networks and evolutionary computing have been exploited by composers for their patterning properties.1 Such systems are not interactive, since all the parameters needed for sound generation are pre-determined. In contrast, strong interaction is exemplified in the human-only practice of ‘free’ improvisation. This music rejects top-down organisation (a priori agreements, explicit or tacit) in favour of open, developing patterns of behaviour.2 Social theories describe experiences with a sense of certainty, and with a unified artistic intent, as ‘becoming situated’. An ‘interactional semiotics’ has been proposed, stemming from Meade’s idea of emergence: an ensemble as single entity exhibiting self-organising behaviours (see 1. for references).

LAM is interested in computer systems that might interact strongly with musicians, in both a supportive and a creative capacity and the research agenda is a marrying of algorithmic music, live electronics and free improvisation. Properties of human performance – and therefore of a live algorithm (LA) – include strong interactivity, autonomy, innovation, idiosyncrasy and comprehensibility. Strong interactivity depends on instigation and surprise as well as response. Individual decision-making is immediate, necessary and basic: when to play or not, when to modify activity in any number of parameters (loudness, pitch, tone quality), when to imitate or ignore another participant, when to ‘agree’ the performance is concluding. When to make a decision. And why. Without the capacity to innovate, listeners would lose the belief that the LA was truly engaged with the performance instead of merely accompanying it. The iterative, generative, idiosyncratic world of algorithmic organisation must be accessed, but the mechanical and the predictable must be avoided. It is the ability to innovate that distinguishes automation from autonomy. It is not hard to generate music of great complexity. Harder, though, is to ensure that these contributions are comprehensible to fellow performers in real-time who might be hearing these ideas for the first time. (But an incomprehensible, opaque system can be contrasted with a transparent one where the association between input and output is too trivial.)

Such considerations show the research goal is prescient, but there are reasons to believe that it is imminent too. The authors’ own Swarm Music/Granulator systems implement a model of interactivity derived from the organisation of social insects.3 These systems embody our idea of a proxy environment which holds meaningless sonic events. The system (human or machine) explores the environment, discovering and manipulating found sonic objects. Long term organisation can develop, just as it does in termite nest construction. Within this framework, we envisage a modular system comprising of analysis (P) and synthesis (Q) functions which interface and interpret the sonic environment and relay parameters to a hidden patterning algorithm (F) (analogous to listening, playing and musical thinking enjoyed by a human performer). This picture integrates interaction with algorithmic composition and exploits recent developments in real time music analysis/synthesis.

The network has some 70 members, including representatives from France, Portugal, USA and Australia. Activities include an open meeting and two network workshops each year. Each event features invited speakers, contributions from LAM project teams and performances. The next meeting will be December 19-20 2005, with an international conference in December 2006. LAM warmly encourages AISB readers to participate: please see www.livealgorithms.org.”

1. E. Miranda. Composing Music With Computers. Focal Press, 2001
2. T.M.Blackwell and M.Young. Self-Organised Music. Organised Sound 9(2): 123–136, 2004.
3. T.M.Blackwell T.M. and M.Young. Swarm Granulator. Applications of Evolutionary Computing EuroWorkshops 2004, Proceedings, LNCS 3005, Springer-Verlag (2004) 399-408

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Nov 15, 2007, 9:07AM