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May 31, 2005
Improvisation, body and mind.
Finally getting a chance to write some again. I have been too busy travelling and playing concerts lately. I should try to get a more well balanced schedule...
In much of the improvised music I play, especially the stuff I do solo with computer (listen to this for example) the improvisation has a preconceived, although loose, structure. One of the reasons this is necessary is that I work with computers and electronic sounds. As much as I wish it was possible to have one big piece of software that would instantaneously adapt to what I play, structurally as well as contextually, I haven't found a way to do this as. Therefore I need to limit the range of possible textures for the computer to react on.
A question that needs to be asked is: What is the significance of this preconceived structure in relation to the musical material? Is this composition more than improvisation? And, in that case, what is improvisation? Is there such a thing as ‘free’ improvisation (i.e. free from preconceived structure)?
In western thinking we are accustomed to use the dichotomies of body and mind, structure and spontanaeity, intellectual and spiritual. In his excellent article George Lewis [Lewis, 1996] (previously discussed in this post) notes that in western musicology there is almost no mention or discussion of structured improvisation. Improvisation is either undeterminacy
or aleatoric
but never based on a structure. This may be interpreted as composition or music creation is either structured and notated (mind) or it is in total absence of structure (body) with an underlying notion that only the mind can structure something as complex as a musical composition.
Posted by henrikfr at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2005
MIDAS workshop in Glasgow
I spent the weekend in Glasgow in Scotland doing a presentation of etherSound. After having worked on this piece for more than two years I think I have finally reached a point where I can feel somewhat satisfied with it. It still has some problems that ought to be resolved. The latence is now far to long - over six seconds. This is the result of the slow response time of the memory and operating system of the phone I am using (a Nokia 6310) although I doubt a more modern phone would make a huge difference. I will contact the people behind the gnokii project whose libraries I use in order to access the memory of the phone. Maybe they will have a solution of how to proceed.
What's positive is I feel there is now a decent balance between the variation and the consistency of the output. The next thing I will do is to recreate a few of the previous performances of the work ‘offline’ so to speak. This will give me an idea of whether or not the algorithms work or not. Also, i will finally get a chance to hear what it sounds like if I implement the original idea of the formant synthesis modelling the series of vowels in the input text. Because of the limited processing power in the real time version I can't have enough overlapping voices to achieve this, but as I recreate it offline, I can have the control program generate a csound score file that i can process in non-real time.
I felt alright about my presentation, although it is difficult to give a full presentation of this work in 20 minutes or so and my feeling was it would have been better to focus on one single aspect rather than trying to talk briefly about everything that etherSound is and tries to be and how it works. I was also told that, while most of the feedback I got was very positive, some of the participants had some serious doubts about my project. I would be very interested in knowing more about what constituted this criticism. I would also gladly engage in a discussion around this. I think that soon it is time for me to leave etherSound behind and move on to the other projects of my PhD. I have learned many things from it and I will have great use of this knowledge and of the thoughts it has provoked in the following years to come.
Posted by henrikfr at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)