Ever wished you could have your own 10-piece ensemble that lived in your house and would play “In C” for you whenever you had the desire? Well, I’ve just completed a project that may make that dream a reality. Well… maybe not reality, but pretty darn close.
I’m satisfied that at least one of the many projects I’ve started recently seems to be coming to a conclusion. Not too long ago I had the notion to start a project that would combine my hobbyist-level programming skills, my appreciation for Terry Riley’s modern classic “In C”, and my penchant for witty project titles into a software tribute to this masterpiece of minimalism. I’m surely not the first person whose mind has wandered while listening to “In C” and made the connection to popular programming languages C and C++. As a matter of fact, in order to save myself a little embarrassment I googled it to see if anyone had tried something like this before. I discovered one such project, but decided that I could take it to a different level and provide a different perspective. Besides, it really sounded like fun.
So I started to lay out my my goals for the end-product: I wanted to write a program that would present the user with their own personal and unique performance of Riley’s venerable piece. When you start the program, you have three controls: relative length of performance, start, and stop. When you press “Start”, the program reads the placement of the “length” setting and begins to work through the score. It chooses a random configuration of instruments and octave displacement for those instruments and begins to play. From there it’s pretty simple: each instrument is programmed to make it’s own decisions regarding the established rules of the piece. Pacing and dynamics are decided on the fly, making the program seem surprisingly non-artificial. I can actually start the program while I’m working on something and enjoy listening for several hours as my computer provides a personal interpretation of this great work.
If anyone has an Intel mac and would like to demo the program, I would be happy to pass it along.
Orchestral composers and those who wish to be orchestral composers face a dilemma. I think Kyle Gann in his new-music blog PostClassic has done well in identifying the issue. You can read the whole post here, but I will try to summarize his main point. At the end of his post, he tells the story of a composer who was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra (!) for a new piece. The work called for some moderate extended techniques involving the orchestra taking cues from a singer while the conductor adjusts volume levels at a mixing board. The piece was sight-read two nights before the performance. Both a planning meeting to discuss the technique and a dress rehearsal of the piece were canceled. The performance was the second time the orchestra had seen the piece. Gann closes by saying, “A classical music world that treats great composers that way deserves the worst that can possibly happen to it.”
Two things really bother me here. First of all (and if you read his post, he further punctuates this point), this is not an uncommon story. Lack of rehearsal time is bad for any piece, even one that has been in the repertoire for 200 years, but is crippling to new music. Without the support of the ensemble and the administration, it’s no wonder contemporary music is in the state it’s in. Second, it’s the American Composers Orchestra. When the ACO can perform such a faux pas, to what standard can we hold other symphonies?
If I have a point, I suppose that it is only to say that if you are a composer and want to get your work performed, you are better off writing works for smaller ensembles and individual performers. They will give it more attention in rehearsal and often, if they like it, they will give it multiple performances.
Today I had one of those moments where you get this thought that you start to consider and, like the proverbial thread, you pull on it and something unravels that changes your whole perspective. I was listening to some contemporary compositions and I started thinking about the role of melody. For many of my younger years as a musician, melody was my pivotal focus. It was the central pillar of my understanding of music and was always my first task when I would sit down with my sketchbook to write. But I’ve been listening to a lot of recently written music and I have slowly started to awaken to the fact that melody is no longer king. And then that thought triggered another: how long has this been true? I thought back through all of the different and diverse areas through which classical music has traveled in the 20th century and I was astounded to realize how often the melody is supplanted by the textures, or the rhythmic interactions, or the tone coloring as the aspect that draws you in and makes you remember the work later. You can trace the line of melody’s fading spotlight fairly consistently back to the turn of the century. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is a major exploration of texture and rhythm. Varese’s Ionisation explored worlds completely fixated on rhythm and color. Boulez composed intricate and deeply varied textural gestures with a perfect precision. Minimalists created aural tapestries full of undulating patterns by distilling melody and concentrating it. And then came the electroacoustic pieces. Before I knew it, all I could think about was how insignificant melody was to so many movements and composers. I didn’t even mention people like John Cage, Morton Feldman, Iannis Xenakis, George Crumb, or Krzysztof Penderecki who so wholly embraced non-melody in such fascinating ways. The whole point of so much music in the 20th century is taking the craft of composition to a level beyond the basic elements of melody and accompaniment. And then the final – and terminal – thought that unraveled my sweater revealing the “I’m with stupid” T-shirt that pointed to my own face:
so this is what they were trying to teach me in 20th century music history class…
It has been so cool working on motion tracking, but it has not been without its problems. The code has actually been fairly easy and straightforward, but I’ve hit the ceiling of what my RAM can handle. And I’m on a 2GHz MacBook. By the time I’ve captured the video and processed it to recognize and assign tracking nodes, I’ve used up 50% of my RAM. I didn’t realize how big a problem this was until I started trying to code in gesture recognition. For every functional algorithem, I lost surprisingly large amounts of processing power. I’m not sure if it’s because 25 times every second I’m performing such a huge number of mathematical computations or the camera driver just sucks up all the power on its own. And it’s not just a problem in Pd: I’ve tried using a tracking library in Processing, but it actually seems to consume more power than Pd. What I need is a super efficient algorithem that will give me enought headroom to do all the cool gesture recognition stuff. I’m looking into trying yet another program that is from the offset more geared towards video, but I’m not completely convinced it will be the answer to all my memory problems. My final solution may actually be to string together three different computers: one to capture input, one to perform the evaluations, and one to run the audio. Maybe four so I can do more with graphics animation…
Anyone have a computer they would like to donate to the Aaron Fryklund Center for New Music Research?
I just created a piece using my new motion-tracker prototype. The interesting part, though, is that I didn’t use my tracking gloves, but rather an incandescent lamp. In order to facilitate the tracking, I have to limit the color range of the input. While it does work to highlight the gloves, it can still pick up direct or reflected white light, as it contains the full visible spectrum (remember middle school science?). So as I was working on the patch while letting the audio run, the lamp next to my couch decided to show me how it’s done. While I am a bit bummed that the first really interesting product of the engine was created by a lamp and not my own gestures, I am quite please with the direction it seems to be going. In the meantime, the lamp is scheduled to begin touring music festivals and academic institutions beginning in October. The full tour schedule will be released soon.
PS – Happy Birthday to Levi “Boss Man” Duggan. Check out his well-rounded thoughts on spirituality from an intellectual standpoint at http://www.damascusbound.blogspot.com/
You know, years ago when my Dad taught me how to solder some wires together to give my pinewood derby car LED headlights, I never thought that it would be a skill I would use again. Or that if I did that I would actually remember how to do it. Yet here I am; I’ve just put together a prototype apparatus for a new project using resistors, LEDs, and camera tracking. I am working with a flavor of interactivity that I don’t think I ever expected to find myself invested in. My new device will allow you to make music with gestures of your hands. I know it’s been done before, but I would like to see what sorts of pieces I might be able to come up with that would involve such a (presumably) intuitive device.
Ah! There’s the trick: making it intuitive. For every smooth and easy interface that we use every day, there are piles of code and thousands of hours invested in development to make it so natural. Whenever possible, I try to reuse someone else’s code for things like this, but some of the methods and gestures I seek to implement are unique, and in fact are what I believe will set it apart somewhat from other gesture-based endeavors.
I’ve just finished the first stage of the prototype, that is that I have built the hardware, set up the interface, and have begun collecting data. My burden now is to take that data and find ways to interpret the gestures I have defined so that they will be recognizable with the least possibility for misinterpretation. I know that I’m just digging a hole for myself, but I intend to use six points of tracking with gestures that not only take into account distances but speeds and even three-dimensional rotation.
I realize that I may have just said a lot of nothing and you may still be wondering about many of the details of the project. I do find myself inclined in the early stages of these projects to keep the cards somewhat close to the ol’ vest, but am eager to reveal more and more details as my prototypes turn into working pieces. So stay tuned! This one is developing rather quickly!
I am currently reading a book called Choral Music in the Twentieth Century by Nick Strimple. I have had this book in my possession for months, but have only just now endeavored to read through it. My perception of it when I bought it was that it would be great as a reference, but would be dry and difficult to read through. I now understand the truth to be quite to the contrary. The style is as engaging as it is informative. One composer I was just reading about is Ernst Krenek. Stravinsky said of him that he was “an intellectual and a composer, a difficult combination to manage, and he is profoundly religious, which goes nicely with the composer side, less nicely with the other thing.” This grabbed my attention because I have always seen in myself that same dichotomy of the intellectual and the spiritual. What I really wanted to post here, though, was a quote Krenek published in the late sixties on the topics of listening and composing. The last part is particularly meaningful for me.
“Music may be appreciated on different levels, separately or simultaneously; as a vital force that affects us immediately, at the core of our being; as a symbolism that through traditional associations suggests emotional qualities; as an artful combination of sound materials that fascinates our intellect. In a great work of music these elements are integrated, and the listener will enjoy such a work to the fullest extent if he is mentally equipped for such a three-fold integrating perception. Aesthetic study will go very far in explaining the artistic perfection of a great work. Psychological investigation may reveal just what musical factors cause the particular emotional reactions to such a work. It is the element of vitality that seems to defy analysis. We only know that it must be present, for without it neither the subjective soulfulness nor the intricate construction will suffice to arouse our sustained attention. One may call this mysterious element “inspiration,” which is substituting one unknown quality for another. The only control that a composer has over the factor of inspiration is that he must not release any musical thoughts of which he is not absolutely sure that they completely satisfy his inner vision. In other words, he must like what he has written to such an extent that even after thorough search of his own conscience he would not consider changing a single note. If he does that, he has done all that is humanly possible. Whether the criteria by which his nature compels him to decide what he likes are the right ones in order to endow his work with greatness and vitality, is a matter of divine grace.”
Frustrations have abounded lately for certain threads of my electroacoustic endeavors. The good news is that anytime I return to Pd, I feel right at home and my frustrations are put to rest. But I have for some time now sought methods by which I might explore creating electroacoustic music through environments that are not Pd or audio sequencers. For a while I was fixated on using objective-C or C++, however I was thoroughly unprepared for the arduous process that is modern GUI linking and and compilation. I guess maybe if I had taken computer science a few years later than when I did, I might have gotten a good start there, but alas. I had also studied Csound for a while, an environment based in the C language that can do a lot, but it’s lack of real-time interface disturbed me a little, as the real-time component was my main catalyst for studying electronic music in the first place. Most recently I was tinkering with an environment called Common Music built as a type of extended Lisp library. Getting it all running on my MacBook was a little more trouble than I had time to deal with, so I have once again returned to the familiar embrace of PureData. I feel so empowered in Pd. I’m like MacGyver with object boxes.
Back in the acoustic realm, I recently started and finished a project dedicated to a close family friend who was taken from us two weeks ago. It had been years since I had the opportunity to speak with her at length, so it came as a great surprise when I found out that she had in the last few years been really into singing in the choir. I decided to compose a choir piece in tribute to her with combined text from the Psalms and from the words of those posting on her Facebook wall after her death. It has a spoken section in the middle that might remind some of certain works of Adams or Corigliano that feature individuals in a choir speaking short phrases of text. No word yet on possible performances, but I am still exploring.
Finally, I added a new feature to the website. I joined Twitter rencently and have decided to take full advantage of it’s permeation on the internets. Since it integrates so easily with Facebook updates and simple html with css, I’ve put it on my front page to replace the “News” box. But since the “tweet” format seems a little more fluent for random, off-the-top-of-your-head stuff, I may consider later crafting a news box that is a combination of silly tweets and actual career news. We’ll just see how it plays out. Also, I’m very interested in creating Haiku tweets. So I’ve got that going for me… Oh, and I’m also very dissapointed in the lack of celebrity composers who use Twitter. Right now, all I’ve got is Steve Reich, which is awesome, but I crave more. I guess for now I will have to find contentment following Darth Vader’s tweets.
I lied. There is one more thing. You should all go check out my sister’s awesome new website. She just this past week created this site to showcase her amazing paintings, prints, and photos. Definitely an up-and-comer to reckon with in the art scene. Go check it out! Now! Why are you stillreadingthis?!??!? GO!!!!!!
My generative project that up to this point had no name now has a name! I’ve decided to call it the “pseudo” engine, partially inspired by a fascinating article I read about computer science pioneer Alan Turing. The article focused on the benchmark he devised, known as the Turing Test, in order to determine if computers can or will ever be able to produce independent thought. It is a very intriguing subject, and in case you are wondering, the general consensus is that computers as we know them now are at best capable of merely imitating intelligence and not rational human thought. Given such a conceptual turning point with the project, I thought it would be a nice treat to upload a recent product of the pseudo engine. It made this recording during a brief session last night. It’s serial, but only at the most basic level. That is to say that the pitched relationships are fully serial, but no other elements are yet serialized. It also means that the compositional algorithm is by no means intelligent, nor is it imitating intelligence (some might argue that as long as I’m working on it, it never will be…). The row it devised is quite interesting, though, in that it seems to occupy at times a place between tonality and serial non-tonality. Unfortunately, I failed to log the row before closing the program and it is lost forever, unless I someday decide to sit down and analyze a piece of which I don’t actually have an official physical record of composition process!
The second recording is the (perhaps?) long-awaited prototype debut of the Paroles engine. I figure I’ve been hocking it long enough that it deserves a little proof-of-concept. The recording is a simple test, briefly hitting a few of the main operative modes. I’m having some MAJOR issues with filter freak-out. If I’m testing the engine for more than five minutes, something somewhere will inevitably go horribly wrong and all my sounds start to glitch and clip in alarming ways. As I continue to refine it, this will be one of my biggest bugs to work out, as it could be a potential performance killer. Filters should come with warning labels (The grand irony here is that as I write this I am going back and testing, and I may have already cornered the culprit… we shall see soon.)
At any rate, I welcome you to have a listen to both samples. As both projects are not in their final stages, there may be big changes to some aspects of what you hear. I would love to hear any comments on your impressions of either project and how you think I could improve upon them. Have a great week everybody!
I learned a new word today: idealogue. An idealogue is an individual who believes that the only correct way to do something is their way. Here is the context: I heard an interview on NPR this afternoon with a modern architect. He used this word to describe modernist or traditionalist architects who think that the only correct, pertinent, etc style is the style under which they fall. It caught my ear because this word describes a constant struggle I find within myself. In a practical sense, I typically find myself in the opposite mindset, that is I don’t have any qualms about drifting between styles from one piece to the next. I suppose that my developmental arc up to this point has covered a wide enough range of style that I’ve never really felt entitled to be so boldly and rigidly loyal to any one mode du jour. On the other hand, I often find myself in what I have recently startet to consider an unhealthy state of mind, passing judgement on a work based on its ratio of modern to traditional elements rather than its technical quality. I don’t know: maybe it’s some kind of knee-jerk survival instinct left over from my recently concluded time as a student. My opinion on the matter is that, particularly in our age of global diversity, holding the narrow perspective of the idealogue is both unprofitable and unhealthy. In order to counteract my own idealogue-ity, I have modeled my compositional approach after composers such as György Ligeti who spent much of their careers composing in a wide variety of styles. While I remain oppossed to pandering, I believe there is some wisdom in having an intuitive market-sense when considering a work’s possible audiences. Furthermore, I think it can be a nice challenge to attempt to retain the essence of one’s artistic identity across a spectrum of styles, techniques, and mediums.
(The grand irony here is that as I write this I am going back and testing, and I may have already cornered the culprit… we shall see soon.)