Trond Lossius
Research fellow, Bergen National Academy of the Arts
Bringing the Beast Alive
Performative qualities in computer-based sound and music
7 years ago I turned from composing traditional score-based music to working on electronic/digital sound and music for installations and live performance of various kinds. This has implied radical changes in ways of working and what kind of musical and artistic problems I’m facing. Established practice within traditional musician-based music have often turned out to be invalid or difficult to apply in a new and quite different musical domain. One of several core issues that I’ve been struggling with more or less continuously is how to deal with human prescence and performative qualities.
As a consequience of the development of analogue synthesizers from the 60s and later on the development of the MIDI protocol, the organ became a more or less standardized model for musical interfacing within the commercial music industry. The on/off buttons of the organ was one of the the simplest technical solutions available, but also one of the most limited regarding possibilities of musical expression. When new technology could have offered unprecedented possibilities of subtle work on the inner qualities of sonic events, the MIDI protocol limited this to little but describing onset and duration of the events. There’s currently several ongoing large scale research programs aiming at broadening the possibilities of gestural control of musical data, e.g. Cost287-ConGAS (Gesture Controlled Audio Systems) [1].
The shift from performed music to work on sound also represent radical changes in roles and functions involved in music production. E.g. the Spanish sound artist Francesco Lopez claims that one of the major shifts of electronic music since the 80s is the elimination of the performer [2]. In one way this might be a liberating position, on the other hand one also risk loosing an inherited tradition of subtle musical expression that has been developed over several centuries. Indeed electronic music might sometimes be criticized for sounding dull and dead. [3]
My own artistic work is to a large degree based on using MaxMSP [4]., a graphical programming environment for music, audio, and multimedia. I’ve typically been using it to create some kind of generative process that will be able to run for an infinite duration. The ability to escape the linear timeline domain of scored music, sequenzers, score editing software, etc. was what first appealed to me about Max, but as time has gone by I’ve felt a growing urge to be able to organize several such processes into more complex systems changing over time, in a sense reintroducing large-scale timed sequences of events in a way that is not always easy to achieve when using MaxMSP.
For projects carried out over the last five years, I’ve tried a number of different approaches towards these issues, often integrating more than one kind of approach within the same work. Roughly approaches can be divided into three main categories.
Environment
Emmerson [5] discuss musical development as a continuous dialectic process between body and environment.
The body generates many rhythms and sensations with cyclic periodicities lying within the duration of short-term memory. The most important are breath, pulse, and the limb movements of physical work, dance, and sex. These are a product of our biological evolution, our size, and our physical disposition in relation to the mass of the earth— hence its gravitational field—and would be different if we had evolved to be the size of a bat or an elephant, or if the earth had possessed a different mass.
The environment has a different time scale—with both periodic and aperiodic rhythms—and this is often beyond the limits of short-term memory. This often necessitates repeated listening and consignment to long-term memory, thus encouraging contemplation and consideration: water, wind, the seasons, landscape.
Escaping the body, creating artificial soundscapes of various kinds, have been a core motivation for a number of projects. Influenced by the ambient music of Brian Eno, and through him Cage and Satie, my aspirations have been somewhat similar to Risset [6]:
One of my early desires as a musician was to sculpt and organize directly the sound material, so as to extend compositional control to the sonic level – to compose the sound itself, instead of merely composing with sounds.
Installations have to me seemed a more suitable setting for this way of listening to sound than presentations as concert music.
The first sound installation I made, Texture I, was intended to be installed in an abandoned building in the ghost town Kolmanskop in the Namib dessert. For a number of practical reasons this never happened.
For the installation Elektropoesia (Elektrohype biennale, Malmö konsthall 2004 in collaboration with the video artist Kurt Ralske), the sole sound sources used were a two minute recording of the monotonuous pink noise of a strong river, and tidal waves measured at the harbour in Bergen for a period of one year, sonified into a 10 sec. sound file. Various strategies of filtering, playback at different speeds and pitch shifting were used to create further sonic variety. The tidal wave data was also used to control variations of the various parameters over time. The tidal data exposed energy at a wide variety of frequencies as well as distortions due to changing weather and the limited resolution of the measurments, thus offering complex rhytms and irregularities at the same time.
For the installations in collaboration with Jeremy Welsh and Jon Arne Mogstad [7] I’ve been misreading video files by Welsh as sound files with rather obscure encodings and sample rates, and further processed the resulting sounds.
Audience interaction
In spite of being sceptic about the value of audience interaction, it has been an important element in a number of projects, in particular a series of installations in collaboration with composer Asbjørn Flø and others ( Erotogod, 2001-03, Norway Remixed, 2002, Lydspor, 2004). While interaction might pretend to be democratic in the sense that anyone can contribute on the same level, I find that the interaction often becomes superfluous or requires some kind of skills on listening and improvisation, even if the interface/instrument is different from anything one has experienced before. Some of the audience will have previous experience and training that make them more apt to explore the artistic potential of the interaction.
Rather than offering true interaction, the installation Lydspor (Ultima 2004) created what might be considered the negation of interaction. The sound material explored faults, errors and noise of electronic and digital signals in various ways, partly based on sound generated by computers crashing, interference of electronic components in cheap PC loudspeakers, feedback, misreading e-mails as music, etc. All sound sources would start and stop abruptly as buttons were pushed and released, and it would be more or less impossible to create any meaningful organized music from playing the buttons of the interface. The buttons was positioned to far from each other for one person to be able to control them all at the same time, and if several spectators, it easily evolved into chaotic conflicts with one or more “players” overriding the others. The result somewhat resembled the Moment form suggested by Stockhausen:
During the last years there have been forms composed in music which ar far removed from the form of the dramatic finale; they lead up to no climax, nor do they have prepared, and thus expected, climaxes, nor the usual introductory, intensifying, transitional, and cadential stages which are related to the curve of development in a whole work; they are rather immediately intense and – permanently present – endavour to maintain the level of continued “peaks” up to the end; forms in which at any moment one may expect a maximum or a minimum, and in which one is unable to predict with certainty the direction of the development from any given point; forms in which an instant is not a piece of a passage of time, a moment not a particle of a meassured duration, but in which the concentration on “now”, on every “now”, makes vertical incisions, which breaks through a horizontal concept of time, leading to timelessness.
The buttons were positioned on a aluminium grid floor. People arriving at the room and responding to the floor often created a kind of “found” performances.
Performer interaction
For true in-depth interaction I’ve found it more interesting to work with performers or musicians on projects, using technology to extend their possibilities and range of expression, but doing so through a process where they get accustomed to the techniques used, and learn to play them in a meaningful way relating to the general framework and concept of the project.
A slightly different approach was used for Ekkofisk (2000-01) in collaboration with Reinert Mithassel. The 3D-positions of two gold fishes were determined using video tracking, and the resulting data used to generate sound. The position of the fishes were translated into synthesised male and female voices respectively, mapping position data to a number of musical parameters including pitch height, note duration, phrase length, volume, depth and rate of vibrato, glissandi, panning, etc.
