Thinking the unheard: Hybrid thought in musical practice Simon WatersDirector of Electroacoustic Music StudiosUniversity of East AngliaNorwich NR4 7TJ

There is no absolute ear; the problem is that of having an impossible ear - to make audible forces that are in themselves inaudible. In philosophy, it is a question of an impossible thought, that is, making thinkable, with very complex material, forces that are unthinkable. (Deleuze)1

Introduction

Hybrid thought – the very conjunction of the terms is provocative in its unvoiced assumption that the primary modes of thought are, by implication, not hybrid. The urge to name and classify, to construct disciplines through characteristic discursive strategies and language sets, to identify the condition of ‘belongingness’ to a predeterminedconceptual category in an object or experience, is an urge which we can all recognise. But surely the urge to make irreverent connection, to make mess and provoke disorder, toinvoke as Foucault famously does (quoting Borges) in the opening to The Order of Things (Foucault, 1970, xv) the impossibility of such taxonomic stability in accounting adequately for human experience, is just as fundamental an impulse.

This essay assumes a polemical position with respect to mess, arguing that hybridity of thought and a preparedness to confront ‘the disorder of things’ are pre-requisites for engagement in arts practice as research. From an entirely partial position as a university-based composer of electroacoustic music and director of a suite of studios in 1 Concert Homage to Gilles Deleuze 19-20.01.1996 Cité de la Musique

which an established community of research students are currently working on projects which in various ways refuse to recognise a distinction between musical composition and other practices, a series of observations are presented which elaborate on various aspects of hybrid thought.

These observations build on - and, in the spirit of John Oswald (1987), plunder freely from - those made in previous publications (e.g. Waters 1997, 2000a, 2000b) in which I identify, both among my students and in the broader composing community:

a change in sensibility from what I characterise as an acousmatic2

culture (broadly concerned with sounds as and for themselves - as ‘material’, and based - in historical practice - on analogue technology) to a sampling culture (concerned with context, and based on digital technology)... ... [which] is intimately bound upwith a broader shift in cultural perspective, sometimes characterised as a shift from the modern to the postmodern (2000a:56)

A list of the key concerns which currently occupy the team of research students at my institution will give some idea of the activities regarded as falling within the remit of ‘composition’: interactivity; feedback; interference; agency; gesture; embodiment; automata; complex/hierarchical/closed/open/dynamic systems; prosthesis; improvising machines; meta-instruments; interface design; human-computer interaction; disorder; inexpertise and marginal competence. The researchers (students, research associates and professional visitors) are working under the umbrella of the ARiADA project3 – a

2 The concept of acousmatic culture is understood as revolving around Pierre Schaeffer’s notions (Schaeffer, 1966), elaborated byMichel Chion (Chion, 1983, 1991), of l’écoute reduite or reduced listening, and l’objet sonore or the sound object.

3 Applied Research in Aesthetics in the Digital Arts

three-year AHRB-funded4 initiative looking at the aestheticsof digital arts practice. Among current researchers:

Some regard the emergence of skills which address the ‘digital nature’ of digital information as essential, rejecting too-familiar metaphors from analogue activity; overlapping in some respects with this approach is a concern to blur or ignore differences between ‘human’ and ‘machinic’ agency in digital interventions; some continue a modernist concern with ‘difficulty’and the resistance of materials and processes; some flag the medium of delivery or storage as equal in significance to any putative ‘content’; some simply develop strong antithetical aesthetic reactions to what they perceive as utilisations of ‘too obvious’ qualities characteristic of work produced with digital technology. (Waters, 2000b)

The various instances of their work (and of others working in a similar vein) which follow form the support for a claimthat the ‘extended field’ of composition is (and should be) a rich source of evidence of hybrid thought, and should attempt to embrace and confront the disorder which is at theheart of dynamic systems.

HybriditiesThe hybridities under observation are (by definition) varied. Some have come about through practitioners attempts to escape the limits of their own practice, some through juxtapositions of established but distinct bodies of knowledge, some result from the folding-in of spatial or temporal distinctions, or from explorations of human-machine-biology or ‘us-them’ overlap. There is no attempt to determine an ‘essence of hybridisation’ - to do so would,as Jean-Luc Nancy points out, be self contradictory (Nancy, 2000, 150). With respect to music we have too readily ‘inherited inappropriate paradigms for current musical practice’5 , such as notions of ‘score following’ or ‘conducting’ which are still prevalent in some areas of the music/technology overlap, the piano-roll like ‘note on/off’ 4 Arts and Humanities Research Board of the British Academy.5 Jonathan Impett – Research seminar at University of East Anglia, 22.04.02

mentality which informed the establishment of the MIDI standard6, and the fixed-timbre fixed-role orchestration model underpinning ‘General MIDI’7. The projects described represent attempts to embrace more productive paradigms.

The headings used below are somewhat arbitrary, and are included as a navigation aid, rather than indicating any attempt at a taxonomy of hybridity.

Hybridities between existing distinctions within a discipline

An exploration of the territory between music and noise is as old as the distinction itself - old hybridities between the two have long since firmly entered the domain of ‘the musical’. The twentieth-century’s expansion of the percussive and the mechanical, the parallel opening up of ‘the intimate voice’ and ‘small sounds’ to public scrutiny through the intervention of amplification, the production ofelectronic sounds not subject to the constraints of physicalmaterials, Cage’s incorporation of the unforeseen and the silent - all of these indicate a concern to incorporate previously ‘extra-musical’ phenomena firmly within musical activity. This tendency continues to manifest itself in the embracing of noise and distortion – mostly evident in ‘pop’ music but periodically emergent in ‘art’ music:

Noise and distortion have long formed part of the expressive vocabulary of pop music, and it is unsurprising therefore that it should be in pop music that a reaction to the smooth professional surface which digital technology allows in both image and sound should emerge. This concern with the signifying possibilities of noise, dirt and distortion is given an additional discursive dimension (analogous to the spatial - to left/right, or distant/present continua) in the digital world of high resolution,extended dynamic range and enhanced spectral clarity by the introduction of a continuum of resolution from distorted to clear reproduction, from deliberately compressed or reduced dynamic or

6 Musical Instrument Digital Interface - http://www.midi.org/about-midi/specshome.shtml7 http://www.midi.org/about-midi/gm/gminfo.shtml

spectral range to ‘professional’ polish. As an expressive device this continuum is particularly well used by artists who emerged from the Bristol club scene in the early 1990s, notably Tricky andPortishead, and is rapidly adopted by electroacoustic music practitioners. (Waters, 2000b)

In some cases this continuum is articulated partly through the collision of digital ‘hi-tech’ technologies with resolutely ‘lo-tech’ solutions to musical problems. Ed Kellyand Nick Melia’s Block Groove8, one of numerous electroacoustic works from the 1990s to explore this route, uses shellac, vinyl and digital recordings and the interventions, treatments and ‘degradations’ characteristic of all three, to construct a piece in which there is play between an ‘acousmatic’ sensibility, the performed interventions, and intrusions from the material support of the recording which frequently emerge as ‘content’. This might be interpreted as a McLuhanesque signalling of the mode of representation, of the means of encoding, as inseparable from ‘what is represented’9.

Melia’s solo work goes further than this, operating at the extremes of the perception threshold in both frequency and amplitude. By using primarily extremely high or extremely low frequencies, and sounds which are replayed at or just above the ambient noise level of a particular performance space, the composer inhibits ascription on the part of the

8 ARiADA, University of East Anglia, 1999

9 In a similar vein, a Madonna video - Don’t Tell Me - featured regularly on MTV in December 2000, foregrounds technologies of representation by featuring the singer astride a bucking bronco inan image, initially ‘clear’ - and read as ‘real’, which becomes striated by the horizontal transmission lines of NTSC encoding as we zoom towards it. In as further ‘nesting’ of the modes of representation we then pan out to reveal that all of the image thus far has been reproduced on a huge multiple screen in the desert, and that ‘reality’, as we knew all along, has even greaterresolution.

listener, approaching a state in which there is “deferral ofspecific kinds of representation”.10 Alistair Gedge’s strategy, related but operating at a different perceptual extreme, is to utilise the phenomenon of acoustic compression of the human ear when exposed to situations of high amplitude high frequency sound. The detail-masking and ‘pumping’ effects which intervene in a work such as Personal Space for cymbal and digital tape11 render the onstage ‘effort’ of the percussionist increasingly supplementary to the experience.

To revisit briefly a theme touched on earlier, the fact thatnoise/glitch/lo-fi/lo-res should become a preoccupation of ‘art’ composers simultaneously with their emergence as part of the stock-in-trade of the club scene is a clear indication of the redundancy of such distinctions as serious/transient (or valuable/disposable). In practice it is now not only possible but aesthetically desirable that a single individual might be equally fluent with the complexities of post-Ferneyhough notation, acousmatic electroacoustic composition, C++ programming, and the more imaginative end of techno, and feel free to draw on all aspects of these in defining their own musical practice. Thework of Edward Kelly is illuminating in this regard, appearing in London Sinfonietta programmes, in internationalacousmatic/electroacoustic festivals and on techno and remixCDs, without there ever being a sense that one of these areas predominates or constitutes an ‘authentic’ practice with the others being magnanimously regarded as ‘interesting’. In each case the work is seen as vital and authentic within the discourse out of which it grows by others working within the same area, whilst also incorporating characteristics from well outside the terms ofreference of that practice which are indicative of the composer’s breadth of imaginative resource.

10 ARiADA research seminar, 17.03.03, University of East Anglia11 first performed 19.02.01 in ‘Sonic Arts 19’ by Simon Limbrick at the John Innes Centre, UEA

A distinction between composition and improvisation has beensustained by institutional interests for some time at the expense of a more ‘joined-up’ approach to musical practice. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at least, the dominant technology of musical speculation was notation,and a value system based as much on prejudice as on criticalthought allowed musicology through most of the twentieth century to continue to regard this as the case, despite the emergence of recording as a generic musical practice, and despite the evidence of musical genres which celebrated speculation through performance (e.g. jazz) and recording (much pop music). The ubiquity and speed of current computersystems which enable quasi ‘real-time’ manipulation and control of music both as sound, and as symbolic data, has heightened the sense of a possibility of a speculative musical practice which effectively recombines the notions ofcomposition (in the sense of speculation in symbolic logic),and improvisation and performance (speculation through the physical control of sound events) – a ‘real-time’compositional practice.

In this emergent area of ‘music as embodied action’12, the term ‘interactive’ frequently occurs, although it is framed more critically than in those areas of human-computer interaction where it merely signifies a degree of user control over the navigation through an on-screen experience,as musicians have a history of intimate familiarity with an extraordinarily rich and malleable set of interactive interfaces for sound production - conventional acoustic instruments. One fruitful approach to providing an environment which allows ‘real-time composition’ is to extend the capacities of such existing instruments through autilisation of aspects of the rich relationship between player and instrument as the primary data for a computer’s intervention in a live performance.

12 Jonathan Impett – Research seminar at University of East Anglia, 22.04.02

Jonathan Impett’s ‘metatrumpet’(Impett, 1994) involves a series of sensors13 attached to a concert instrument, running through an I-Cube interface14 to a Macintosh Powerbook equipped with Max/MSP and a custom-developed suiteof programmes. These allow for real-time composition in which every aspect of the work emerges as a result of the interaction between live performance and meticulously designed, complex but familiar Max/MSP patches. The strengths of Impett’s project grow out of his exploration ofa particular and personal set of skills and interests over aconsiderable timespan. Paradoxically, while there was no intention to develop anything other than a personal tool, what can be learned from this particular instance of interface-building has a value which outweighs more idealistic attempts to produce ‘generic’ solutions15. What the project illustrates with clarity is that aesthetic valueis bound up with specific instances of mapping - that as digital tools are open ended mapping (and remapping) machines, there is no longer any significance in the fact that one particular set of inputs can be used to control or intervene in a set of outputs. What is significant is the nature of the controls and interventions - their appropriateness to the physicality of the input, and the legibility of the relationship between such input and the system’s interventions and outputs in social space.

Recognising the possibilities of, for example, physical modelling synthesis systems (Eckel et al 1995; Smith, 1996) in which some attributes of Newtonian physics can be ignored, or where the physicalcharacteristics of sets of materials can transform over time, playersand composers look for interfaces to such systems which can utilise the propensity for play - for speculative or improvisational strategy

13 Mercury switches, pressure, ultrasound, Hall-effect, acceleration and breath sensors are used, and pitch to MIDI devices and envelope followers also operate on the acoustic signal.

14 http://www.infusionsystems.com/

15 A fact evidenced by Yamaha’s current interest in the project.

characteristic of acoustic instruments. Such ‘improvisation’ strategies frequently share a sense of utilising the exhilarating immediacy and subtlety of control, and simultaneous capacity for ‘out-of-controlness’, which is characteristic of physical feedback systems. Much current compositional activity results from attempts tosubvert the tendency of the digitally-based studio to replace such direct physical feedback systems with controls which are mapped to replicate such systems, but which are insufficiently complex and immediate in their response. As skills in analysing physical feedbacksystems and in mapping develop, digital control systems are likely toprove indistinguishable from16, and ultimately more flexible than, their analogue counterparts. (Waters, 2000b)

As indicated above, distinctions between the functions of performer, composer, instrument designer and listener are characteristic of the process of professional specialisationwhich emerged in the eighteenth-century, but these become less tenable as digital technologies contribute to a reformulating of working practices and modes of information storage and dissemination. Much software use destabilises the text/performance distinction, and inevitably the notion of the ‘interface’ incorporates aspects of software and hardware, and behaviour with respect to both, within its remit

These shifts can be seen in the projects of Phil Archer and John Bowers, both of whom make extensive use of real-time digital signal processing of live (performed) input, and forwhom the status of a particular software ‘patch’ might simultaneously be that of a ‘work’ analogous to a score, while also incorporating aspects of performance – both as aninstance of ‘a particular performance’ and as co-performer with dynamic or algorithmic responsibility for both structural and acoustic-fact aspects of their practice. Archer’s early work includes Duet17 for performer and

16 Where this is the aim. Of course the remapping possibilities of digital systems may in the long term render replication of analogue functions an irrelevance.

17 Download and commentary at http://ariada.uea.ac.uk:16080/ariadatexts/ariada1/

computer - a SuperCollider18 patch which exemplifies the inadequacy of the distinction between ‘score’ and ‘instance of performance’. The patch allows determination of the absolute length of a performance, and of the probability at any given moment that the live performer’s input will be sampled to a buffer and processed, and determines certain potential types of sound processing, but for each particularrealisation the acoustic result may be highly characteristicand unlike previous instances.

Xavier Berenguer, referring to earlier research (Garzotto etal, 1995), lists some of the more established guiding principles for the successful design of interactive systems,noting:

...in the first place the programme's "richness", that is to say abundant information elements and paths to access them. In the second place, the "ease" of use, or the accessibility of information and the simplicity of the operations which lead to it. "Consistency" is also desirable, the programme's regularity, the similar management of similar elements. The user must be ableto guess meaning and purpose from any element of the programme, its "self-evidence". Finally, Garzotto notes another evaluation criterion of an interactive's design: its "predictability", the capacity it gives the user to anticipate operation results. (Berenguer, 1997)

Of course, as soon as such principles are articulated they invite critique, and the ‘ease of use’ principle in particular can be identified as problematic in several respects. This principle informs the design of much ‘interactive educational’ software, on the mistaken basis that the short-term attractiveness this produces constitutesreal interest. More pertinently for the current discussion, aesthetic production and (modernist) notions of value are tied up in the social domain, and for many practitioners, with notions of difficulty - of the ‘resistance’ of materials, or working ‘at the limits of’ the capacities of tools and instruments. The fluctuations and behavioural 18 A real time audio synthesis programming language available at http://www.audiosynth.com/

unpredictabilities of analogue systems under extreme conditions have a recurring position in aesthetic activity, Edward Said’s useful characterisation of performance as ‘an extreme occasion’ (Said, 1991: 1) and John Coltrane’s obsessive exploration of the unstable sonic ‘breaks’ of the saxophone providing just two examples. Digital systems ‘under stress’, however, behave differently, tending to cut out rather than oscillate into the distortions and transformations which have come to connote ‘expressivity’.

Few have attempted to deal with this in a critical manner. Shigeto Wada, a current ARiADA research student, regards such concerns as evading the issue of the particularities ofdigital systems. Rejecting the notion of modelling analogue systems in the digital domain, he proposes19 that we allow digital systems to produce a ‘characteristically’ digital sound - fuelled by integer streams rather than digitisationsof analogue input - which we need to learn new strategies tocontrol and understand. In a similar vein he proposes the development of ‘non elegant’ programming such that the breaks and reconnections of complex systems are embraced as part of the aesthetics of digital operation.

Much of John Bowers’ work concerns itself with critically investigating the emerging principles of interaction design and human-machine interfacing. He develops (e.g. Bowers and Hellström, 2000) four principles of ‘interaction design’ which differ considerably (especially when taken together) from those of Garzotto et al (1995). ‘Algorithmically mediated interaction’ separates out a ‘layer’ of algorithmicmediation which is distinct from ‘direct manipulation’ - often by capturing or storing input data for use ‘out-of-time’ - so that ‘different peripheral devices, transformation algorithms, and sound models can be freely exchanged’(ibid). Input devices with a small number of degrees of freedom are used to introduce ‘expressive lassitude’ - requiring careful algorithmic design to

19 in currently unpublished research for ARiADA

compensate for the small number of input data streams. (In Wanderley’s terms ‘divergent’- or ‘few-to-many’ mappings areused, but in combination with design principles which overcome his observation that such mappings ‘do... ...not allow access to internal (micro) features of the sound object’. (Rovan, Wanderley et al.,1997) In further contravention of the principles enumerated by Garzotto et al.(1995), Bowers and Hellström use ‘dynamic adaptive interfaces’ which rescale or remap input over time such thatthe interface’s relation to sound changes dynamically, underalgorithmic control. Finally, their concept of ‘anisotropic interaction space’ - where non-linear and discontinuous mappings are utilised so that the significance of movement over (for example) the two dimensional surface of a touchpadbecomes context-dependent, allows the possibility that radically different interactive characters may emerge from the same device in a manner which is not wholly predictable,requiring real-time evaluation and adjustment on the part ofthe performer.

It is significant that, at the most basic technical level ofintervention in and control of sound, both Bowers and Archerhave shown considerable interest in working with granular synthesis20, which is itself something of a hybrid, affording the suppleness of temporal control and event distribution previously associated with sound-generating synthesis systems, but the spectral and cultural richness ofsampled input. In the process of ‘granulation’ streams of audio data are broken down into multiplicities of small packets of samples, the behaviour of which is controllable in real time (with respect to many parameters, from the readspeed of the input data, through the length and pitch of thesamples, to their looping, overlapping, etc). The grain behaviour can be analogous to that of the swarming and streaming of insects or bird flocks. Essentially, where sampling in its more ubiquitous guise encourages the

20 see e.g. the pioneering work of Barry Truax at: http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/gran.html or a recent implementation in Max/MSPby Karlheinz Essl at: http://www.essl.at/works/replay.html

juxtaposition and recontextualisation of ‘semantically-significant’ musical artifacts (whether recognisable or indexical at the level of single-gesture incorporations or meta-historical juxtaposition and quotation), granular synthesis encourages the extension of this principle in the direction of sonic micro-surgery, making the audio stream palpably time-fluid and malleable to the composer/performer.

Hybridities between disciplines

It is taken as axiomatic that music is already a multi- and inter-disciplinary pursuit - that composers speculate not only about musical structures but about social ones, about ways of being in the world as well as in the work. Nevertheless, the notion that musical activity inevitably embraces issues such as interaction, behaviour and interfaceis worth revisiting. As I have written elsewhere, shared metaphors for process and organisation increasingly bring together practitioners from different fields, enhancing their awareness of conceptual connections between their activities. Similarities in interface design and commonalities of language:

make the previously very different tasks of organising and transforming text, static and moving visual images, and sound, into experientially ever more similar processes. The new electronic technologies therefore form a seductive potential meeting point for many previously separate arts practices. Such interfaces make use of identical concepts: frame, freeze, copy, paste, loop; as controlling strategies… (Waters, 2000a: 59-60)

The importing of terminologies - metaphor-sets which may noteven be fully understood in their new context, may nevertheless prove productive or stimulating, indeed creative misunderstanding is undervalued as an engine of aesthetic innovation. Hybrid thought can here function as a strategic device for defamiliarisation – allowing us to refine or redefine our knowledge of our own practices.

Spatial or temporal hybridities

Some of the hybridities which have proven fruitful in driving aesthetic experiment involve the folding-in of spatial or temporal distinctions within a work or experience. In the temporal domain recontextualisation and re-use are encouraged by the combination of mass storage andinstant recall which characterise digital systems. Of courseall time-based experiences are already comprehensible at least partly in terms of temporal relationships perceived both in the time-frame of the event and in ‘after the event’rationalisations of these, but here I’m concerned more with the processes of framing and re-framing becoming central through recording, dissemination, digitisation, buffering etc. A recent composer-in-residence at UEA, Justin Bennett21, hasconcerned himself particularly with relating the space represented by environmental/soundscape22 recordings to the social space of the performance. Bennett’s concerns with “mapping the public space of the cityscape onto the private listening space”23 (and private experience of the city onto the public space of the performance) have led him to design a performance interface in which he controls the listener’s virtual spatial relationship with a number of sound environments (stored as soundfiles). Issues such as distance, alignment and direction determine a meta-environment which is reproduced in the performance space, with Bennett navigating the virtual space onscreen from

21 for projects see http://www.bmbcon.demon.nl/justin/docs/index.htm22 The concept of the soundscape is elaborated at: World SoundscapeProject: http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html ; EarthEar Soundscape Info Center - http://www.earthear.com/sscape/ ; World Forum for Acoustic Ecology archive - http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/FC/WFAESCN/menu.html ; The UKSoundscape Community - http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/soundscapeuk/welcome.html

23 ARiADA research seminar, University of East Anglia 15/10/02

within the performance space in order to promote a dynamic relationship with the audience.

With respect to temporal issues it is unsurprising that Linda Hutcheon should have identified ‘historical metafiction’ (Hutcheon, 1988) as symptomatic of late twentieth-century literary concerns synchronously with the sampler’s appearance and increasing ubiquity in the musical domain. The framing of historical material or events within an expressly late-modern mindset or language (or vice versa)has obvious parallels in the emergence of the first significant musical tool designed expressly for both recording and performance – for the reframing (articulation)of ‘historical’ musical fragments (however recently historical) within contemporary structures (frameworks).

The genre juxtaposition and overlay which characterise this approach musically, which preoccupies composers like Tom Wallace24 (and which he attributes to the experience of urban living, in which ‘environmental’ sounds and those of multiplicities of musical sources constantly compete and interpenetrate) have become commonplace in a world of DJ remixes. Although the availability of samplers obviously contributes to the likelihood of such juxtapositions occuring, equally aesthetically significant is the extent towhich live remixing activity has availed itself of older technologies such as the turntable, and the rapidity with which aspects of genre collision or dislocation have spread to purely live musical activity, whether this be the ‘polystylism’ of some 1980s concert music, or the impressivehigh-speed montages of John Zorn's band ‘Naked City’.

A provocative and sophisticated time-manipulation machine isMatt Rogalsky’s software emulation and reworking of a piece of hardware in regular use in FM talk radio shows in the USA. As such shows are funded by advertising, the development of a box which removes ‘redundancies’ and 24 in works such as City Systems (1997-99) Paradigm Discs, London

silence from speech in ‘real-time’ results in a spectacular saving of up to eight additional saleable minutes in every broadcast hour. Entirely characteristically, however, ratherthan rejecting the redundancies and silence, Rogalsky’s software version offers the option of storing these as soundfiles. One resulting project, the issuing of such trimmings from an entire day’s BBC Radio 4 broadcasting as amulti-CD set, received surprising levels of media coverage, but more importantly, draws attention to just how characteristic (and essential to subtleties of communicationand expression) such ‘redundant’ material is. Applied to musical material the process can have extraordinary and beautiful results.

Human-Machine-Biology hybridities

Among the many possible impulses for incorporating computersinto musical practice one might list the monitoring of humaninput to musical systems with a view to better understandingexisting human concerns in organising time-based activity, the augmentation of creative activity through engagement with new models for organising and the emulating of apparently ‘musical’ or ‘musicianly’ behaviours or responseson the part of the computer. High-profile artists such as Stelarc25 have done much to familiarise a broader audience with the prosthetic potentials of technology in the physicaldomain, and musical practice with its complex mix of physicality, abstraction, palpability and transience forms arich area for research where notions of embodiment, prosthesis, ‘virtual physicalities’, machinic, algorithmic and human agency, etc. can come to the fore.

As the hybridities between human, machinic and other biology-like potentials are gradually understood, some of the issues with which ‘computer musicians’ initially concerned themselves become less taxing. Frustrations with the limitations of the ‘grid’ conception (quantised pitch 25 http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/

and metrics) which informed MIDI’s original specification led commercial software manufacturers to provide ‘humanizing’ functions for sequencing software which introduce ‘random’ deviations to the time-domain quantisation of events. As Théberge comments: “What is interesting here is how the “human” has been defined, primarily within technical culture, as “random”....” (Théberge, 1997: 226) The inadequacy of this solution to replacing ‘machinic precision’ with ‘gestural precision’ is countered only by the ingenuity with which some musicians proved able to ‘trick’ such software or hardware into producing acceptable or interesting results.

John Bowers has chosen to address this and other issues relating to music-technology interpenetrations in terms of ‘improvising machines’. Bowers’ text on this area (Bowers, 2003) is significant not least because it brings a convincing methodology for critical engagement with one’s own practice to the fore - that of ethnographic study. As anacademic computer scientist and sociologist as well as a practising musician, Bowers is particularly well-placed to do justice to such an approach. From a position in which electroacoustic music is regarded indigenously as a ‘machinemusic’ he formulates an aesthetic for improvised electroacoustic music which draws on “the variable relationspeople can have to technologies and each other in a machine world”. He presents five (of a larger series of) Max/MSP applications which have been extensively tested in performance and refined in order to maximise their usefulness in pursuing the aesthetic goals he formulates. Characteristically, his discussion is framed in the broader context of a considered refusal of theoretical oppositions between composition and improvisation, and of a survey of various types of music in which the notion of ‘improvisation’, treated as a member category, is examined in terms of its significance to those who use it.

The work of Matt Heckert is an illuminating instance of a critical and speculative attitude to the relationship

between ‘clock’ time and ‘gesture’ time. In 1988 he began working on the Mechanical Sound Orchestra - a group of computer-controlled mechanical sound instruments . This collection of industrial-scale machinery26 has been presented in various manifestations in the USA and Europe, Munich Samba being awarded the Golden Nica for Computer Music at the 1997 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.The juxtaposition of the temporal quantising and ‘precision’of MIDI data with the inertias and unpredictabilities of physically massive machines is described thus in the Ars Electronica programme for the same year:

Continuous controllers are used to vary motor speeds and note events are used for switching transistors, and it is this information that is recorded by the software. Once recorded and stored as a sequence or sub-sequence, any series of control commands can be used at any time. When called up from the computerkeyboard, controller information is sent out instantly and the system responds much like any MIDI controlled electronic instrument, but the big differences are the inertial delay encountered when stirring a machine out of rest... (Ars Electronica, 1997: 13)

Thus far I have assumed that the only issue with regard to dealing with temporal issues relates to differences between notions of human and machinic precision, but of course humanaction is neither all conscious nor all intentional, and many improvising practices have embraced the accidental and the ‘unproficient’ as essential to their creative vocabulary. Unsurprisingly then, marginal competence and inexpertise, ‘automaton’ human behaviour and what Bowers dubs (in an entirely celebratory and positive light) the ‘spastic body’ form important sites of investigation among ARiADA composers.

Davros is an exercise in shared agency and exchanged prosthesis. A human agent, the system’s ‘composer’ Stef Edwards, stands encased in a steel frame to which are attached various control devices (knobs, buttons and 26 http://www.mattheckert.com/MSO/Sound_Machines.html

switches), a microphone, and a system of electric motors andpneumatic devices. The motors drive nylon lines which are attached to the performer’s cheeks, and inflatable ‘inner’ lips are fed by the pneumatics, altering the resonant cavities and labial characteristics of the mouth. A laptop computer on a plinth next to the performer provides all the impulses for the control of these physical manipulations of the human performer, who reads from a text which is displayed in front of him according to algorithmic processesrelated to those which manipulate his vocal production. In a‘mirror’ procedure, the performer controls the buttons and switches which algorithmically transform (in pitch, formant filtering etc.) the speaking voice of ‘Fred’- the laptop’s generic speech synthesiser, who reads from fragments of the same text as the human performer, delivered by the same algorithmic system, in a sort of disfunctional dialogue.

The composer’s concerns in Davros are to avoid what he regards as ‘flabby notions of interactivity’:

As a performer I’m looking for a different relationship with technology than that which I’m used to. I decided that the computer and I should both make sound – that we should both make the same type of sound – that we should both have a voice. Then I set about finding ways in which we could influence each other’s behaviour, seeking to minimise the difference between us, while acknowledging that the ‘relationship’ isn’t equal.27

It is characteristic of a composer who shares with other members of his research community an interest in the ‘deferral of interpretation’ that he espouses an interest in‘programming for unexpectedness’ (to himself) - in ‘making asystem sufficiently complex that one can’t know what will happen’. Another of his projects, Radio Pieces, encourages listeners to phone into a radio station while keeping their radios – tuned to the same station – as near to the telephone as possible. The resulting acoustic feedback from the open phone-lines, mixed and balanced by the composer at

27 Stefan Edwards, in a seminar at the University of East Anglia, 10.03.03.

the radio station as it happens, animates this ‘central’ space with the influence of the distributed, external spacesoccupied by the listeners, providing the ‘silent’ core with ‘content’ to broadcast.28

Shigeto Wada’s compositional concerns in his ‘multi-user performance space’ have less to do with the phenomemology ofparticular organisations of sounds than with models of social systems. Sphere is a computer environment for a number of participants in which collaboration and consensus are possible among the various ‘actors’ and in which there is also a machinic agency which may benignly aid such possibilities, but may also intervene to impede communication or otherwise alter the data exchanged between participants. The system is optimised for multi-user musicalimprovisation, and is flexible enough to cope with a wide variety of different types of input – commercial MIDI devices, data from sensors of numerous types, digitised audio streams, etc. – but could equally be adapted to utilise text or image. One of the initial impulses for the composer/programmer’s work was his concern to explain to colleagues, metaphorically, some of the complexities of the Japanese language, which embraces not only the person/time distinctions of European declension, but codifies social position, age, employment, family relationship etc. in the use of distinct language subsets. The formalisation of certain types of context dependent exchange has substantially informed some aspects of the structure of Sphere.

David Casal, a gifted pianist and improvisor, quotes Minsky’s (e.g. Minsky, 1986, 1989) mind/body/will model as asignificant point of departure in his design of a computer improvisation system for which his aim is “to provide a prosthetic extension of the rhythmic principles already evident in my own playing” and to “extend these beyond the realm of virtuosity”. The hybridities involved here are 28 Radio Pieces was first broadcast in June 2002 by Resonance FM, a limited coverage London-based station.

partly interdisciplinary (AI/music/computer science) and partly systemic (e.g. neural network and genetic algorithm approaches are combined). The composer invokes a selection of semi-autonomous agents, programmed in Python29, which behave as a generative system, algorithmically ‘breeding’ new binary strings, producing mutations or ‘offspring’ as a continuous process, these being mapped to rhythmic structures. ‘Machine listening’ - using ‘self-organising maps’ which constitute the ‘eyes and ears’ of the Minskyan model of corporeality - is invoked to effect judgements about the viability of the various offspring, killing off some processes and nurturing others, depending on how ‘interesting’ or ‘boring’ they are considered to be. The ‘self-organising maps’ (a species of neural network) have been ‘trained’ by exposure to the composer’s playing, and the rhythmic models which survive the process of selection based on criteria partly derived from this ‘compositional model’ are mapped to the selection of samples from an archive (‘sound fonts’), and to transposition (pitch alteration) of the samples. The interest of this project is the number of levels on which there are significant hybridities of thought. The notions of ‘data mining’ and ‘content-based data retrieval’ which are prevalent in military and business applications are combined with specialised code from other fields to accomplish a resultingmusical output which is sufficiently sophisticated that it forms a provocative and productive performing tool for the composer.

Developing a portable performing environment is not unusual as a compositional motivation. In Adam Green’s system two types of ‘guiding behaviours’ are modelled, both of which have the capacity of imbuing activity with characteristics from observations of the natural world. ‘Boids’ – a term coined by Reynolds30 - are agents which exhibit streaming and flocking behaviour in virtual 3D space, but in which theindividual behaviour of each ‘boid’ element might at any

29 http://www.python.org/30 http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

point counteract the general movement tendency – as Green puts it: “I give a global impression to the boid flock and the individual elements ‘decide’ to what extent they will follow”. The parameters actually controlled for each boid element with respect to other ‘flock members’ are separation, alignment and cohesion. Cellular automata are 2 or 3 dimensional ‘grids’ in which any of the cells may at any time be ‘on’ or off’’ but in which at all times each cell exhibits strong influence over the behaviour of its near neighbours. This leads to the ‘spread’ of data in a manner which is somewhat predictable, and controllable by intervention in the cell data, but which has its own dynamics. Metaphors for these two types of control might be bird flight and the spread of a microbe culture on a petri dish, and it is the similarities of these at a systemic level to some aspects of musical construction which has led the composer to incorporate them within a Max/MSP environment which takes data from his trumpet (switches indicate valve combinations, a microphone provides data for pitch analysis, while simultaneously streaming the live trumpet sound into buffers in the computer). By careful mapping of some aspects of signal processing (pitch transformations, filtering, delay functions, buffer selection, granular synthesis, triggering of samples both ‘live’ from trumpet and pre-stored) to controllers from boththe boid system and the cellular automata, Green has built asystem which has considerable musical autonomy, but which hecan ‘guide’ by his playing towards preferred outcomes. The preferred outcomes however are not only selected by prior experience with the system, but may also be ‘in-the-moment’ performance decisions. The system has a responsiveness whichapproaches that of (a number of) human agents, but is almostentirely dependent upon the input of a single performer/composer.

Ethical Issues (hybridities between ‘others’)

Hybridity is an issue which is ethically urgent in the political arena, where ideologies of purity, most notably

genetic purity, have given rise to some of the most destructive moments in history, and continue to underwrite fundamentalism, ethnic hatred, and behavioural bigotry. Writer Jeff Noon, whose work uses hybridity as a principle of investigation and defamiliarisation, regards it as an issue which ‘leapfrogs questions of race and gender’. In hiswork ‘ the hybrid is celebrated, rather than opposed’31. Noon’s novels (e.g. Noon, 1993; 1995), incorporate hybriditybetween animals and humans, reality and virtuality, the living and the dead, even plants and humans, and although nominally set in Manchester ‘in the near future’, the geography is multi-dimensioned and even the temporal frame of the book seems hybrid, with frequent references to the 1960s. Indeed Noon sees the 60s in a primarily positive light as ‘a celebration of confusion’.In compositional terms the hybridity of Noon’s work maps closely onto the concept of a ‘sampling culture’ discussed earlier. It shares a sense of celebration of unforeseen collision and mutation, and a suspicion of purism. Although most obvious at the structural level where previously separate practices meet and combine, hybridity can operate at any level within composition from the formal and contextual to the microscopic, where the possibility of ‘morphing’ between sounds was for some time a major concern of software authors.32

Phil Archer talks of “ influence from the outside” as a shorthand which involves acknowledging his involvement in a series of recontextualisations – of musical material, of hardware, of software, and of culture. In musical material, the ‘other’ for Archer is a palette of sounds and their modes of organisation which are “far from an electroacoustic

31 In a presentation reading at UEA Drama Studio Theatre, Norwich,27.10.95.

32 An example being CAST (CNMAT Additive Synthesis Tool), developedat The University of California Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technology.

music ethos”33, among current examples being tap-dancing andthe music of Juan Garcia Esquivel. His models here are not only John Zorn and Christian Marclay, whose music “shifts from and between recognisable styles of music”, but more significantly musicians from Japan, such as Naohiro Fujikawawho has produced (as Bisk) among other things Piano Music by Error System from sampled piano music34. Archer’s response hereis not only to the acoustic fact of the music, or even to genre, but to the deliberate undermining of notions of ‘appropriation’ and ‘misappropriation’ as useful tools for comprehending another culture. This celebratory approach to the ‘sampling’ of artefacts or aspects of a culture - a sortof ethical hybridity - has recently been addressed with specific reference to Asian/Japanese cultures by Terre Thaemlitz (Thaemlitz, 2002).

The adoption of ‘lo-tech’ approaches to compositional problems may involve an implicit or explicit political agenda, for example an intervention in the corporate logic through the utilisation of obsolete or (deliberately) archaic domestic music technologies.

Such issues (along with a pragmatic economic sense) inform the useof turntables as performance devices in the urban subculture of the US in the 1980s, and their use by experimental musicians (Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck35) intent on drawing attention to the medium of the recording. (Waters, 2000b)

This critique gains a further dimension when the interventions are within the corporate machine, not at some 33 This, of course assumes, against the grain of this paper, that thereis an electroacoustic music ethos.

34 On the 1998 CD Ticklish Matters (sub rosa sr 141 / efa 10734-2)35Philip Jeck is best known for his A Vinyl Requiem (London, 1993) with Lol Sargent, a performance/installation involving projection from 2 slide- projectors and 2 movie-projectors onto a bank of 180‘Dansette’ record players. Work by New York-based Marclay, whose business card apparently describes him as ‘record player’, is documented at http://www.artpace.org/artists/artist.jhtml?ID=90

abstract level, but as ‘circuit-bending’, garage electronicsand other forms of extended deliberate physical (mis)use of existing technologies. Inspired by the pioneering work of Nic Collins (who seems to have been among the first experimenters to successfully remove the ‘mute’ which functions on domestic CD players when they are switched to pause or search) which resulted in compositions such as Broken Light 36 for string quartet and skipping CD player, PhilArcher has developed a family of performance devices which are characterised by a reframing of their function. After initial experiments closely related to Collins’s interventions in portable devices, Archer has moved to larger, mains-powered devices. A Yamaha keyboard, removed from its casing and inverted, is played by connecting semi-arbitrary points on its circuit board with hand-held wires; a Roland sound unit is similarly reworked into a relationship with a child’s toy piano in a hybrid which usesthe control possibilities of the latter to arbitrate relationships between the sound producing mechanisms (one electronic, one acoustic) of both. These ‘instruments’ are contiguous with his approach to the reframing of sound material through sampling, and of computer code through ‘hacking’ together elements from previous found objects. Thelanguage Archer chooses to describe his activity is instructive. He regards himself as “rehabilitating neglectedor overlooked technology” and of making use of that which has not yet been aestheticised, being “too old to be new, but too new to be old.’37

Finally, but no less importantly, there exist areas of experiment in which the status of artist-maker and audience-receiver are deliberately blurred - compositional strategieswhich acknowledge fully “the impossibility of prescribing a response”. The near-silent Melia works referred to above fall into this category, although at times the result may, paradoxically, be to force a listener into a state of anxious overinterpretation. These are works which seek to

36 available on the CD It Was A Dark and Stormy Night (Trace Elements EL101)37 ARiADA Research seminar, University of East Anglia 10.02.02.

establish a “contiguity between composition and performance space”. Concert listeners have reported still being able to ‘hear’ the works some minutes after leaving the hall - surely a limit-case for the notion of emergence as a principle in aesthetic activity - as the physiological effect of ‘over-listening’ kicks in. Chicago-based artist Nic Collins has been less interested in problematising the notion of where (or whether) completion and interpretation occurs but his work with feedback38 nevertheless uses artist/audience/environment interdependencies in that every movement within the performance space alters the frequency/phase response of the room. As Collins’ elegant feedback system uses phase shifts to prevent amplitude extremes it is particularly sensitive to movement, which maytherefore provoke or alter the response from the microphone/loudspeaker installations.

The idea of hybrid authorship might be regarded as a logicaloutcome of such experiments. Already the extent to which theconstraints built into particular software by programmers contribute to the processual and aesthetic outcomes of a composer’s practice are much debated (by e.g. Théberge), andan increasing acknowledgement of the inadvertently collaborative nature of such activities is paralleled by an increased tendency towards intentionally collective or collaborative working practice. While some early electronic music practices necessitated the bringing together of composers with technicians and programmers, the networking possibilities of the physical world are now multiplied dramatically by networking in the digital domain, encouraging the likelihood that collaborative activity mightresult for example from interventions at geographically disparate locations. Within such collaborative enterprise,

38 a videoclip of recent work using feedback, from Sled Dog for Hawaian guitar, feedback and modifed CD player is at: http://www.rachelhaferkamp.de/htm/performances/perfilms2001/collins_film1.htm

the notion of authorship is simply no longer a necessary condition of the work’s emergence39.

39 The use of the term ‘emergence’ here can be taken as indicating a conscious utilisation of the changing boundaries between the subject (listener, interpreter) and the maker (artist, composer), in which the former interact with what the latter has made, such that the work can be said to emerge in its ‘use’, rather than having been designed in its entirety by the artist and then 'presented'. This too might be regarded as a principle enhanced bythe mechanisms (technological and social) associated with digital technologies.

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